Ripple Effect
by rayemars
Summary: Sasuke's return to Konoha, and everything that comes after it. Some people have changed more than they wanted or deserved to. Vaguely AU. B.Y.O.Subtext
1. ripple 1: Naruto

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto. The poem "Not Waving But Drowning" belongs to Stevie Smith.

Yes, it's yet another 'Sasuke leaves the Sound village and comes back to Konoha' story that will become an AU when the manga starts again on the 27th. You've been duly warned.

Inspired by Pellaz's fic "Summer" and its implications of what could happen if Naruto overused the fox demon's chakra.  
——————

**-'**

Nobody heard him, the dead man  
But still he lay moaning:  
I was much further out than you thought  
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking  
And now he's dead  
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,  
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always  
(Still the dead one lay moaning)  
I was much too far out all my life  
And not waving but drowning.

**-'**

He had cut it dangerously close. Two years and eight months wasn't enough time for him to learn everything that Orochimaru had been willing to teach him, but Sasuke knew if he had waited any longer to leave, the security would have been almost impossible to break through, even for him.

_I learned enough_, he told himself, _he's no more use to me. I can get even stronger somewhere else_.

Except it **wasn't** enough, and he knew it--sometimes he thought that, for fighting Itachi, nothing he learned would ever be enough--but he'd gained all the power he could while still being him.

Sasuke was more focused on getting away from the Hidden Sound village than he was on going anywhere. He didn't notice he was in the forest surrounding Konoha until he was only a few dozen meters from the walls.

When he **did** notice, his first instinct was to stop right there, turn, and head to the Wind country, or the Water country, or any other country so long as he was out of Fire and it wasn't the place he'd come from.

The stupidest mistake, he decided later, was that he had rested on a branch to debate where he should go, instead of just moving and deciding based on the direction he wound up in. But he'd been running for a long time, and he hadn't eaten since a perfunctory breakfast that morning, and he didn't sense any other chakra or people around him, and he was camouflaging his _own_ chakra, and he was tired. It had been perfectly reasonable to just **stop** for a minute.

So maybe the stupidest mistake wasn't that he had rested, but that he had rested for more than a minute. More than several minutes. More than long enough for Naruto to find him.

He hadn't sensed any people near him, let alone Naruto's distinctive chakra; so when he heard the quiet, almost disbelieving "Sasuke?" at his back, he reflexively jumped out of the tree to improve his position before he even realized who spoke.

Naruto followed him, but Sasuke managed to turn around before he hit the ground.

He expected a fight--over the last two years and eight months, almost all his training had been fighting with almost his life on the line--but Naruto just stood there and stared.

The shadows from the trees concealed them both, so he could only see a few basic changes. Naruto had grown taller, like he had. Sasuke couldn't see his features.

When the seconds dragged on with only the leaves rustling and Naruto staring at him with an expression Sasuke couldn't see because of the shadows, he had to resist the urge to fold his arms and glare.

". . . We were coming to get you, you know," Naruto finally said.

"I didn't want to be 'got'," Sasuke replied.

He could see Naruto bristle, and expected the blond to yell something along the lines of him being a stupid idiot, waited for the chance to use his distraction to get away--but then another second passed, and Naruto just sighed.

Sasuke blinked.

"Did you decide to come back, then?"

Sasuke didn't answer, and this time Naruto did mutter "Idiot."

The other boy's face had dipped towards the ground, just slightly, when he said that; and Sasuke tensed.

Naruto noticed. "Hey!" he snapped. "Stop fucking running away! Where's it getting you, huh?"

"Shut up, dumbass," Sasuke replied. "It shouldn't matter to you anymore."

Naruto's hands clenched into fists at that, and he stormed forward; but he stopped when he was still within the shadows of the trees. "Idiot, idiot, you fucking idiot! Do you think we just stopped caring about--did you think we didn't have--dammit, Sasuke, why'd you come back if you weren't coming **back**!"

"I was just going by," Sasuke said, realizing how absurd the words sounded even as he spoke them. "I didn't come back."

Naruto glared at him, he glared back, and the leaves rustled. Sasuke noticed without understanding that Naruto took a step to the side when the wind blew hard enough to move the branches overhead.

"The whole damn Sound village is probably after you," Naruto finally said, and his voice had quieted down again. Sasuke realized that even when Naruto had been yelling at him, he hadn't been near as loud as he remembered.

_No shit_, he thought to himself. "Probably."

Naruto was still half-hidden underneath the shadows, and Sasuke had a sudden, abrupt suspicion that this was an illusion he'd been caught in, and if he didn't run **now** then in another minute Kabuto and probably Orochimaru himself were going to have caught him; and then he would never get the chance to kill Itachi with his own hands and his own mind.

"Are you gonna sleep in the _trees?_" Naruto demanded before Sasuke's hand could go for his shurikans. "Jerk, are you just gonna let them catch you because you're afraid to come home?"

"I'm not going to sleep in the trees, dumbass." Naruto had a point. "And I'm not _afraid_ to go 'home'. I don't _want_ to. They're different things."

"You total. . . ." Naruto seemed to have satisfactorily decided that after three years Sasuke was still an idiot, so he didn't bother to finish. "You're going to have to rest." But he couldn't resist another dig. "And it might as well be here--we want you back for **good** reasons."

Sasuke made an annoyed noise, which Naruto ignored. The blond scratched the back of his head. "You should . . . you better at least sleep at my--no, the anbu would see you. . . . Shit. Maybe Saku--no, that. . . ."

Sasuke frowned and interrupted Naruto's rambling. "Why would the anbu catch me coming back to your apartment? Did you start vandalizing stuff again?"

He'd expected the other boy to sneer or yell or _some_thing, but instead Naruto went very, very still.

The situation was getting more surreal; if this was an illusion, it was a bad one. Sasuke slipped out two shurikan and held them between his knuckles, the weight giving him a fraction of comfort.

But he kept standing there, watching Naruto shift back and forth on his feet and listening to the leaves. The forest had never sounded so _loud_ before--Sasuke wondered how long it had been since he was really surrounded by trees for extended periods of time.

Then Naruto stepped out of the shadows and into the faded light of the half moon.

_Weird_, was Sasuke's first thought, since the moon wasn't angled right to be throwing shadows over Naruto's cheeks like that.

Then he realized that those **weren't** shadows, and the hand holding the shurikans tightened and prepared to throw them, only this was **wrong** because he hadn't even felt Naruto's _presence_, let alone _that_ chakra, the one that was bitter and felt like aluminum between his teeth and what the **hell** was going on!

Naruto watched Sasuke reflexively slip into a defensive position, and the corner of his mouth quirked in a sad smile. It wasn't enough for Sasuke to see his teeth, and it was still too dark to see the other boy's eyes or hands, but those scars. . . .

Naruto slipped his hands into his pockets, the complete lack of defense in his position a contrast to Sasuke's own tense one, and looked away fully this time.

"Tsunade said I probably relied on the fox demon's chakra too much. They didn't know this was going to happen, or. . . . **Man**, you shoulda heard her cuss out that pervert sennin!" Naruto briefly grinned and scratched the back of his head. "**I** didn't know some of those words!"

The hand fell back down and the smile disappeared, but Sasuke had seen the new sharpness in his incisors. "So I'm not allowed to use it in my jutsus anymore, and now I have to wear this stupid ward thing so that my chakra doesn't freak out all the villagers and stuff."

Sasuke realized that his hand had dropped at some point, and he slipped the shurikan back into their pouch.

Naruto looked up at the moon. When Sasuke didn't say anything, he burst out, "I'm still **me**. I'm not running around tearing buildings down or trying to eat people, but . . . most of them get nervous if they don't see an anbu around me."

". . . Why are you here?"

"I sensed you," Naruto replied simply. "I wasn't gonna let you just run off again. Jerk."

"Why are you **still** here?"

He got a glare for that, and then Naruto crouched down, looking away at the nearby tree trunks and absently stirring a few dead leaves.

"This is my _home_," he replied, quietly, violently. "I don't _want_ to leave. Besides, how'm I supposed to be Hokage if I'm not here?"

If this was an illusion, it was completely wrong and completely right at the same time; and it had caught him. Sasuke snorted. "You're **still** going on about that?"

When Naruto glared up at him this time, there was something in the tilt of his head, in the way he was still crouching on the ground, in the marks on his face that had spread from single lines to several, that unsettled him. Sasuke could understand the villagers' fear.

"Do you still think you're more special than me, Sasuke?" Naruto asked in a low voice.

Sasuke stared down at him and took the challenge. "Yeah."

--

They only fought with fists and weapons, since Naruto had to be careful about not wasting all his chakra these days and Sasuke's fire jutsus would have been a bad idea in the middle of a forest. They had a silent agreement not to use chidori or rasengan.

Sasuke had already seen Naruto unconscious and half-dead from the chidori. It had shown up in his dreams sometimes, even. Once had been enough. He didn't want to see it again.

The fight eventually attracted the attention of the village shinobi.

When the forest began to swarm with anbu and a few jounin, Sasuke disappeared from view. Instead of leaving, though, he balanced on a branch several dozen meters away from where Naruto and Kakashi were talking--if that was the right term, since **now** Naruto was yelling vehemently--and lingered.

It was stupid; he knew that. Even if they didn't pick up on his presence, the blood could give him away.

Naruto's nails were sharper than they used to be, and when he'd flipped Sasuke over his back, they'd cut deep into his skin. The blood ran down in little trails along his arm, every once in a while dripping from his fingers.

"**Sasuke**!" Naruto bellowed, pulling away from the anbu around him and facing the direction the other teenager run in. "Get back here! I'M NOT DONE KICKING YOUR ASS!"

_Idiot_, Sasuke thought, watching Kakashi motion away the anbu behind Naruto's back.

Kakashi put a hand on Naruto's shoulder and said something. The blond had clenched his hands into fists, and he glared down at the ground. Sasuke couldn't see from so far away, but he could imagine the blond shaking with frustration.

Then Naruto jerked away, turned, and flew--not ran, it was too fast to be running, and Sasuke had doubts whether his feet actually touched the ground for more than .03 seconds per jump--back to Konoha, the anbu chasing after him a split-second later.

Kakashi remained once they were gone, staring into the forest in the direction that Naruto had been yelling.

Seeing the man stay there, obviously believing Naruto even if the anbu had thought he was making excuses, _looking_ for him after three years, the thing inside him that he'd managed to keep together during all the time he'd been talking and fighting with Naruto broke. Sasuke turned and fled through the forest, in the opposite direction from the village, forgetting stealth in the need to just **leave**.

He felt Kakashi spot his presence and begin to chase after him, but he had a head start and he was faster. Not as fast as Naruto, Naruto who was losing whatever humanity he had the same way Sasuke had lost his, but he was still faster than Kakashi. Even when he couldn't sense the man's chakra at all, he kept moving.

Sasuke didn't stop running until his legs nearly collapsed underneath him. Where he was, what country he was in now, whether he had gotten farther from or accidentally closer to the Sound village, he didn't know. All he knew was that Konoha was far, far behind him.

It never felt like far enough.


	2. ripple 2: Naruto redux

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.  
------------

-

One country away from Fire was, obviously, not far enough away. Even though he never stayed more than one night in any village, even though he stuck to the large towns where strangers were common, even though he barely talked to anyone and didn't reveal his face whenever possible, five days later Sasuke was eating lunch at a semi-crowded stand when Naruto sat down on the bench across from him.

Sasuke was too cool to choke on his drink, if that was what Naruto had been hoping to see. He just glared at the blond over the rim of his cup.

Naruto was wearing an illusion--Sasuke could see his blue eyes through the long fringe of bangs that Naruto had grown out to cover them, and his fingernails looked normal, and the lines were just six again.

Sasuke berated himself for failing to notice Naruto before he sat down. If his senses were getting this lax, then he would definitely be captured. Or killed by his brother before he even realized Itachi was there.

Naruto waved to the woman moving around in front of the counter, ordered pork ramen, ignored Sasuke's increased glare when he informed her that the other teenager would be paying, and tapped his fingers uncomfortably against the table while waiting for the food.

Sasuke had silently paid for Naruto and began eating faster. He would have just left, but he'd been moving all day and was too hungry to keep going without a meal.

Besides, it wasn't like Naruto was going to let him just walk off; he was going to need energy for the fight.

"The Sound came for you," Naruto said abruptly, still tapping the table.

Sasuke paused for a second, then lifted another piece of chicken tempura to his mouth and didn't reply. But when Naruto didn't continue, he finally said: ". . . And?"

"There was a lot of fighting."

Sasuke gave him another glare, but refused to be dragged any further into admitting that he was interested in Konoha.

Naruto waited for nearly a minute before giving in. He stopped tapping his fingers and folded his hands, looking longingly at the counter where the ramen was almost ready. "Everything is pretty much okay. Kakashi-sensei backed me up and the hag made everyone prepare. A couple buildings got destroyed, and there were people who got hurt, but between Tsunade and Shizune and Sakura-chan, nobody from Leaf died."

Still the 'chan,' Sasuke noted. Even after three years. . . . He tore off another bite of his chicken.

The ramen arrived then, and Naruto dug in more voraciously than usual. Sasuke wondered when he had left, and how fast he'd moved to catch up to him--how long ago had Konoha been attacked? Could he afford to be in one place even for this long?

"We didn't find Kabuto or that snake bastard in the bodies, though," Naruto added through a mouthful of noodles. "They're probably still alive."

_And looking for me_, Sasuke added. And they'd keep looking until he was either dead or too old for Orochimaru to have any use for him.

But Sasuke didn't like to acknowledge that he'd essentially ruined his life over one decision, so he changed the subject. "How'd you get past the anbu?"

"I waited 'til they were all stuck on cleanup duty," Naruto replied, before swallowing. "The whole area around the Hokage's tower is trashed. They must've figured you were there, 'cause Tsunade said Orochimaru wouldn't be so stupid to try and talk to her again."

Sasuke made a wordless neutral noise in the back of his throat.

While Naruto was looking down, focused on cramming ramen into his mouth (because it hadn't escaped his notice that Sasuke was eating faster), Sasuke let himself glance over long enough to study Naruto's face in the sunlight this time.

Naruto looked up again before he could look away, so Sasuke snorted and said, "Those stupid bangs are a handicap. You'll get blindsided one day."

Naruto tugged on them briefly. "No I won't. 'Sides, I got sick of people staring. And it's easier than a jutsu."

"How did you do that to yourself, anyway?" Sasuke asked, casually so that the words would come out even colder. He glanced surreptitiously over Naruto's shoulder and mapped a path to the door through the places where the crowd was thinnest. "Are they really putting _you_ on missions that difficult?"

". . . Training," Naruto said after a few terse moments.

Sasuke blinked at that, and looked over at him. "Training?"

Naruto was glaring at his ramen. "I lost to you. So I had to get stronger."

Sasuke stared at him. Then he clenched his jaw, but the sharp snicker still escaped through his teeth. He leaned over and braced himself on the table, shoulders shaking with barely suppressed, slightly hysterical laughter.

He heard Naruto hiss something under his breath, and then the other teenager informed the woman behind the counter that everything was fine and his friend was just had a weird sense of humor. And then Naruto was dragging him into the street. When they were put of the crowd, Sasuke's laughter faded to an almost tired exhalation, and he shoved Naruto away.

"Idiot," Naruto snapped as he let go of Sasuke's collar. He rubbed a stray trail of juice off his chin with a hand before wiping it on his pants. "You can't afford to be noticeable like that!"

"Go home, Naruto," Sasuke said flatly. "Missingnins don't become Hokage."

"I **know** that," Naruto said testily. "But when you come back with me then they'll realize I was just completing the mission. Late."

"I don't want to go back," Sasuke repeated, growing annoyed.

"That's why I'm gonna follow you," Naruto replied. "And wait until you fall asleep, and then tie up your arms and legs and drag you back to Konoha. By your **feet**."

Sasuke looked over at him.

Naruto folded his arms behind his head, grinning with his mouth closed. Sasuke realized that every smile Naruto had flashed while they were in public had been closed, and guessed that it had become a habit after his incisors sharpened. "You gotta sleep sometime, jerk," he added.

Sasuke gave him a slow, deliberating look, before jumping onto a nearby rooftop and taking off across the town.

--

The idea had been to make Naruto waste most of his chakra racing over the roofs, and then to jump the town walls and lose him in the surrounding countryside. It had been a good idea, up to the point that Sasuke realized he had even less stamina than he'd thought and he wasn't entirely sure where the walls were in relation to his current location. And Naruto was keeping too good a pace with him--he couldn't get out of the other teenager's sight.

Plus, so much for not attracting attention.

He was debating new ideas--Sasuke had had a thought of letting the blond catch him and then knocking him out once they were stopped, but he rejected that as too cheap a tactic to use on Naruto--when, suddenly, _that_ chakra leaked into his senses. Sasuke had to scrabble for his footing when he hit the next roof, and he jerked around to stare.

Naruto had stopped on a sloping porch roof, with two buildings between them. The blond was crouched over so that Sasuke couldn't see his face, one hand on his stomach and the other braced against the shingles.

When he didn't move for several seconds, Sasuke crouched as well, panting and trying to ignore the soreness in his muscles from all the jumping and exertion of chakra, and the heaviness in his stomach from moving strenuously so quickly after eating.

_This would be a good time to leave_, Sasuke told himself; and just then all traces of chakra disappeared from Naruto. With nothing to hold him on the tilted roof, the other teenager slid off and crashed to the ground, out of sight.

Sasuke automatically shifted closer, then started to pull back, and then hesitated and rested one leg on the scratchy surface of the roof while keeping the other tensed. _This would be a really­_--

And then that bitter chakra was back, and much stronger than it had been half a minute ago, and it started moving towards him **fast**.

--_shit_, Sasuke thought calmly.

He turned and shoved himself off the roof almost at the same time the blond landed on it, and began racing in the direction where he hoped the walls were closest.

The last thing he needed was to be arrested for tearing up part of a city in a fight with the fox-Naruto.


	3. ripple 3: Naruto part trois

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto, who has given Sakura a badass pair of boots in chapter 245.

This story has had roughly four endings, because I kept getting to a point where I thought I could stop and then kept realizing there was so much more that would happen. This was the first ending place.  
------------

-

It took them almost two weeks to make it back to Konoha, partly because the news of their fight outside the city had attracted Orochimaru's attention, and partly because Sasuke's kneecap had almost been dislocated when he hadn't been fast enough to block one of Naruto's kicks.

He had been **tired**. It wasn't an excuse for his loss, it was the flat-out truth. His movements had been getting more and more laggard, while Naruto was practically revitalized; and he'd been reaching for more shurikans when the blond had lashed out, and he just couldn't _move_ fast enough.

The force of the impact had sent him crashing into a rock, jarring his spine painfully and disorienting him for two seconds, during the space of which Sasuke realized that he was going to lose.

And then that warm, hatefully pleasant sensation of the curse seal began to slither beneath his skin, waking him up and tinting the edges of his vision purple and feeding him more than enough power to continue.

For one second, Sasuke hated Naruto, Orochimaru, Itachi, and his entire fucking past, as he had to drop his defenses and put himself at Naruto's mercy long enough to force the seal back.

It was only when he was finished that he noticed Naruto hadn't attacked him.

Sasuke opened his eyes again and found the blond crouched a meter away, the bitter chakra faded but his stance still not really human, watching him carefully.

Sasuke turned his head away from the look in Naruto's eyes. "Orochimaru ripped out the seal that Kakashi-sensei did. It's harder to control."

"It's still there?" Naruto asked quietly.

"_Idiot_." Sasuke let his breath out in a sharp hiss. "It'll never go away."

Naruto said nothing, and when Sasuke finally looked over at him, the expression in those dark red eyes was so close to empathy that it infuriated him. Ignoring the jarring pain along his spine, Sasuke shoved himself onto his feet and threw himself at Naruto.

That was a stupid idea, he reflected later, because Naruto's reflexes had become almost too fast for the sharingan, but he had to get that look off the other teenager's face.

He lost the fight.

So they were making their way back to Konoha, slowly, while Sasuke limped along and waited for his leg to heal and Naruto kept running back and forth, alternately checking that they weren't being followed and that Sasuke hadn't run away again.

After one night of sleep, Naruto looked like Sasuke hadn't managed to lay a hand on him, which pissed him off to no end. He didn't want to come back to Konoha with a hurt leg and a deep scratch across his forehead (Sasuke suspected that Naruto was going to keep attacking that spot until he outwardly acknowledged they were equals, which meant he was going to have to learn to defend his head better), looking like he'd been completely bested in a fight. This was hard enough with_out_ that particular humiliation.

Naruto didn't bother with his illusion except when they were moving through towns, and Sasuke had found it unsettling how soon he got used to seeing this new version. He decided it had to be because whenever Naruto spoke, which was a lot, he still sounded the same and made as little sense as Sasuke remembered.

The first night after they'd started returning home, Sasuke had noticed a small necklace that had been hidden by Naruto's coat before.

"If that's the 'stupid ward thing' you were talking about, I think you broke it," he'd commented, laying out his futon on the opposite side of where the door opened, so that if someone walked in he could be up before they would get around the door to see him.

"Huh?" Naruto had said as he finished drying the water he'd splashed on his face. "I lost that a couple days ago. It's probably somewhere in Wind country."

"Then what's that?" Sasuke asked, indicating Tsunade's necklace.

Naruto grinned, for once not remembering to hide his teeth, and hooked a finger around the cord. "This is a bad luck charm!"

Sasuke stared at him. "And you're willingly wearing it."

"Hey, hey, I **earned** this! I'm not gonna put it away!"

"You **earned** a bad luck charm? How does your mind **work**, dead last?"

Naruto had pulled a face and flicked some of the water still on his hands at Sasuke, but he didn't explain what he was talking about--which only confirmed that Naruto still was either an idiot or existed outside of the realm of sense.

By the time they got into the forest surrounding the Hidden Leaf, his leg was working well enough that he could jump again, even though it was painful. Small favors.

It was late at night by this point, and even Naruto was starting to look tired. Sasuke was almost exhausted--they'd been moving since morning, and had only eaten once--but he was the one who'd insisted that they keep going until they reached Konoha (though he didn't state it outright, he just goaded Naruto into refusing to stop by questioning the other teenager's stamina), partly because he preferred to return when it was dark and less people would see him, and mostly because he knew that if he stopped when he was this close, he wouldn't return.

Tired as he was, three years of constantly being on his guard had ingrained a paranoid instinct into him, and Sasuke noticed the faint but unnatural rustle of branches beside them.

So did Naruto, but he had better eyes in the dark than Sasuke. "Damn anbu, all over the damn forest . . . dammit," he muttered quietly enough that Sasuke barely heard him.

He snorted. "Did you really think we were going to come back unnoticed?"

"Woulda been nice. . . ."

The anbu followed them, keeping in a loose half-circle formation that Sasuke was painfully aware cut off their path in all directions save forward, but no one stopped them.

Naruto and Sasuke came to the wall, jumped over--Konoha's gates were mostly for the non-shinobi villagers' peace of mind, since they didn't actually stop the determined--and landed a few meters away from the bridge into the village proper.

The anbu dispersed around them, vague blurs in the edge of Sasuke's vision, probably on their way to wake up the Hokage. He didn't bother to watch them, the way Naruto did. He just stood still and let the knowledge that he was _in Konoha_ again close over him.

It wasn't a comfortable realization, but it didn't smother him either, as he'd expected it to.

"The hag's gonna be **pissed** when they wake her up," Naruto commented, sounding cheerfully resigned. He started walking slowly, and Sasuke followed a moment later.

He looked in the opposite direction of where he and Sakura had stood the last time he'd crossed the bridge, staring out at the dark water and its glimmers of starlight.

The buildings seemed the same--he could see patches here and there, hasty repair jobs and a few serious damages from the fighting that had occurred, but nothing had really changed.

Of course not, it had only been three years . . . but Sasuke felt like he was walking into a dream, or an illusion; things were just slightly off from how he remembered. Or he was off. _Some_thing didn't belong, and he doubted it was the village.

He'd followed Naruto into the hallway of his apartment complex before he even realized it.

Naruto rattled the door several times before the lock got unstuck. Giving the frame a kick for good measure, the other teenager pushed it halfway open before stopping in place. Sasuke was staring out past the balcony, still looking at the town, and had just followed Naruto's movement, so he wound up running into his back.

Before Sasuke could turn his head and demand "Now what?" Naruto snapped, "Hey, Kakashi-sensei! You've got your own apartment!"

Sasuke froze. When Naruto pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside, he moved out of Sasuke's view so that the other teenager could see Kakashi sitting up from where he'd been sleeping on the couch.

The man wasn't wearing his vest, and his hair looked like he'd come straight from his bed to Naruto's apartment, but he still had the mask and his forehead protector situated over one eye. Sasuke looked away and stepped inside as well. Naruto shoved the door shut behind him.

Kakashi rubbed the back of his head lazily. "It was requested that I be here," he said with a yawn. "But you took so long to get back from the gate, I thought it couldn't hurt to get some more sleep. Honestly, you guys, couldn't you have returned at a decent hour?"

Sasuke had forgotten the way Kakashi's voice was always slightly muffed by the mask. Of all the things he'd forgotten or made himself forget, that was an odd one--the mask was always there. It should have been obvious.

"At least you **got** sleep!" Naruto sulked. "Do we really have to go talk to Tsunade _now?_"

"Oh, no," Kakashi said. "Tsunade-sama refused to interrupt her beauty rest for you two. She'll see you tomorrow morning, at nine o'clock." He paused, then added with what was probably a smile, though the mask obscured it: "She suggested that you get some sleep, something to eat, and prepare yourselves to be yelled at a lot."

Naruto didn't speak for a moment, considering the information. Then he shrugged, and said, "Could be worse. First dibs on the bathroom!"

He jogged out of the room then, leaving Sasuke behind with Kakashi.

The teenager refused to look at the floor, so he stared over the man's shoulder at the doorway Naruto had gone through. On the couch, Kakashi yawned once more, this time stretching his arms, before pushing himself onto his feet and walking towards the door.

It wasn't until Kakashi set a hand on his shoulder that Sasuke realized he was shaking faintly.

"He took your seal off," Sasuke said, and the words came out too sharp, too abrupt, and wrong.

"Okay," Kakashi replied. "I can put it back on tomorrow if you're up to it."

Sasuke thought about the way he'd been knocked out completely after the first seal, and shook his head slightly. It was awkward, because he'd tensed up in order to stop himself from trembling. "Too soon. If. . . ."

"You're safe here, Sasuke," Kakashi said, his head tilted enough that he could watch him from his eye. "You can afford to let your guard drop."

Sasuke's gaze shifted even further away at that, but after a few silent seconds, he swallowed and nodded.

"Okay. I'll see you after Tsunade-sama's done venting her anger," Kakashi said with a grin. He paused for a moment, but Sasuke remained silent and looking away.

Had it been visible through the mask, and had Sasuke been able to make himself look at the man, he would have seen Kakashi's grin shift to a faint but not unwarm smile. He patted the teenager's shoulder.

"Welcome home, Sasuke," he said.

Then Kakashi's hand fell away, and he left the apartment, closing the door behind him with another yawn.

The teenager let himself relax with a harsh exhalation. He was still shaking, but at least now there was no one to see it; and it soon went away.

Sasuke listened to the splashing noises that went through the thin walls of Naruto's apartment for half a minute. Then he walked over to the couch and sank down heavily on it, burying his face in the cushion.

Despite the way it irritated his instincts, for the first time in almost three years Sasuke didn't think about the strategic position of his bed or about setting up traps to wake him in case someone entered the room. He let himself just fall asleep.  
-

_Why were you still afraid of being forsaken?_


	4. ripple 4: Sakura

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

There are consequences to Sasuke's actions far beyond this conversation; they just aren't mentioned until later.  
------------

-

Over his life, Sasuke had developed a trick of looking through people while walking. He focused on some inanimate item in the distance and kept his gaze on it as he moved, no matter who came through his vision. It reduced the people around him to objects that had to be navigated--he would look at them long enough to determine that they weren't a threat, and then dismiss their existence from his thoughts.

It was a trick that came in handy while he and Naruto were walking towards the Hokage's tower the next morning. Sasuke slid his hands into his pockets, constantly refocused his gaze on the buildings in the distance, and was able to mostly ignore the people staring at them from the edges of his vision.

But it was impossible to ignore the fact that he and Naruto were technically being escorted to the tower. Kakashi, who'd shown up at the apartment again that morning, was walking behind them, and Sasuke could sense the anbu following several meters further back, even though he refused to look at her.

Naruto was whistling as if everything was normal, and the fact that the other teenager was apparently used to being treated like a prisoner of war only served to aggravate Sasuke more.

--

The meeting with the Hokage wasn't as bad as it could have gone--she didn't sentence him to death, or even strip him of his ninja status--but it didn't go well.

Tsunade must have used the hours between when she was informed of Sasuke and Naruto's return and the time they arrived in her office to work out any anger she had, because she was remarkably composed the entire time she stood in front of Sasuke while he sat on the couch and cursed him out.

She informed him that not only had he made himself a threat to Konoha, but that his presence was going to create a lot of unrest among the villagers. That he'd destroyed the shaky calm between Hidden Leaf and Hidden Sound by returning. That righteous vengeance was **not** a good reason to put other people's lives at risk, or even a good ideal to live by. That actions have consequences. And that she wasn't able to remove the curse seal.

She'd tried to take off Anko's, and it had almost killed the woman. Sasuke was even further advanced; there was no hope for him.

When Tsunade had finished, and was staring down at him with her hands on her hips, Sasuke stopped gazing stonily out the window and looked up at her.

"I already knew that," he replied. "I know all of that."

Tsunade had continued to stare down at him for a few silent moments, before saying "Good."

Then she dropped her hands from her hips, turned to Naruto, and asked what the hell he'd done with _this_ ward.

Naruto hadn't spoken since both Tsunade and Sasuke had harshly told him to be quiet the first time he tried to speak up in Sasuke's defense, and now he gave the woman a slightly nervous grin and scratched his elbow. "I, uh, lost it somewhere."

"**Again**?"

"I was running around a lot!" Naruto said defensively. "Those stupid things have really thin cords! It's not my fault they keep breaking!"

"'Really thin cords'? What do you want to do, hang it around your neck with _rope?_" Tsunade asked with well-veiled amusement.

Sasuke pretended to drink the tea that she had perfunctorily ordered and stared out the window again.

Half a minute later, when the lecture had trailed off into Tsunade telling Naruto to stop calling her hag or she was going to make the next ward with a chain, Sasuke heard the door behind them open.

He looked at the reflection in the window, but whoever was there was mostly hidden behind the door, and it was too hazy to make out a recognizable face. Tsunade looked over Naruto's shoulder.

"Sakura, what it is?"

Sasuke's hands tightened around the cup, and a moment later he set it back down on the tray and folded them, one curled up loosely and the other laying over it.

"Um . . . I . . . I heard the rumors," Sakura said from behind them, and her voice, unlike Naruto's, hadn't changed much over the past few years.

The blond burst into a wide grin--which Sasuke noticed didn't hide his teeth, whatever that meant about the surrounding company--and turned around enough to lean over the back of the couch.

"Hey, hey, Sakura-chan, look!" he crowed, pointing at Sasuke. "I told you I would! I kicked his ass until he came back!"

"Shut **up** already," Sasuke muttered, shoving Naruto's hand away.

Naruto ignored him. "Will you look at his leg? He's pretending it doesn't hurt, but I think I really busted it."

Tsunade glanced over at him, and he could see Sakura moving out from behind the door and into the room. Sasuke tilted his head enough to glare at Naruto. "You wish, dead last. I'm fine."

"Liar. You were walking weird the whole way here! And it keeps making popping noises!"

Sasuke turned the power of his glare up a notch.

Tsunade looked between the three of them for a moment--Naruto twisted around and giving her an expectant expression, Sasuke who was back to glaring out the poor window again, Sakura standing near the door with her hands in front of her and the fingers intertwined--and then snorted.

"Sakura, look at his leg. Come on, Naruto, I have to make you a new ward."

Naruto sulked as he turned fully back around and stood up from the couch. "I hate those things," he muttered. "They make me feel weird."

An almost regretful expression flitted across Tsunade's face, and she briefly rested a hand on his shoulder.

But then she pushed him toward the door and replied, "Well, **I** don't like having to remake them. It's time-consuming."

Sasuke watched the reflection of the two of them leaving, and then picked up his cup again. It took Sakura a moment to walk up beside him.

"Hi, Sasuke."

She'd cut her hair a little shorter than before, but she still wore her forehead protector as a headband. "Hello."

". . . So, can I see your leg?"

He frowned as he set the cup back on the tray. "It's just a minor bruise. It'll heal soon enough."

"Well, let me see it so Naruto won't whine that I didn't do my job later."

"Your job?" Sasuke looked up at her. "You're a medical ninja?"

Sakura nodded. "I finished the official training a few months ago."

Sasuke paused for a moment, and then nodded. He pulled up his pants' leg past his knee.

"Augh!" was Sakura's immediate reaction. "Sasuke, you were _walking_ like that?"

". . . Jumping," he said, staring in only half-concealed amazement as Sakura's vague discomfort abruptly disappeared.

Sakura made a noise under her breath that Sasuke interpreted as 'you moron' while she knelt down next to him and gingerly touched the dark bruise spread across his knee. "Does it hurt more when bent or when you're standing?"

"Bent."

"Okay." She poked the edge of the bruise below the side of his kneecap. "Does this hurt?"

"Yes."

"A lot?"

"No."

"Good," Sakura murmured. She pulled up the other leg of his pants and pressed the skin around his good knee, before doing the same, though more carefully, to the bad one. Sasuke folded his arms over his chest and hid his hands in the crooks of his elbows.

"Hm. It's swollen, but I think that's from the bruise, not from a fluid buildup." She pulled the pants back over his good leg.

"I'm sorry," Sasuke said.

Sakura blinked. "Huh?"

She caught on a few seconds later, though, and looked down at the carpet. Then she moved from her kneeling position to a sitting one. Sakura pulled her legs towards her chest and folded her hands over her knees, interlocking the fingers again.

"It's okay," she said quietly. "After . . . Naruto and I made Kakashi-sensei finally talk to us, and . . . I'd forgotten about your family." Sakura brushed a strand of hair away from her face and smiled slightly. "It's kind of funny--I really thought I loved you, but I didn't even remember something that important."

She looked up at Sasuke, who was watching her with a blank expression that almost hid his surprise. "And, okay, you're not exactly as brilliant as I thought you were," she told him, still smiling. "But . . . I can understand why you thought you had to do that. And I'm glad you're back. We missed you, Sasuke."

Sasuke stared at her for a few more moments, then glanced down at the floor before looking to the other side. ". . . thank you."

Sakura nodded, looking away as well. It was quiet between them for a little bit.

Sakura pushed herself onto her feet. "All right, I'm going to get a scroll and some ink for the jutsu. Can you move to the floor? It'll be easier than telling Tsunade-sensei that I let you put your feet on her table."

"Fine," Sasuke said.

Sakura nodded, stood still for a moment, and then turned around and left the room. Sasuke watched her reflection until the door closed behind her.


	5. ripple 5: team seven

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.  
——————

**-'**

Sakura had him walk around for a while after the jutsu was finished. The bruise had decreased and faded to what was known in layman's terms as 'the ugly yellowish-brown stage.' It would be gone in less than an hour. Sasuke was moderately impressed that she'd become so skilled in just a few years.

But only moderately. He'd always known that Sakura was talented at chakra manipulation; he'd just never seen her do anything about it.

They had walked around the courtyard surrounding the Hokage tower, and were just returning to it when Tsunade and Kakashi came out, bringing Naruto with them. The blond was moving unsteadily, like he'd been drugged. Tsunade had her arm over his shoulders, and Sasuke suspected that Naruto would be swaying if she weren't there to steady him.

"There you are, Sakura," Tsunade said. "We're done here."

"Okay," she replied, before walking up to Naruto. She knelt down slightly in order to be able to look up at him, and said with a smile that Sasuke could hear in her voice, "Hey, Naruto, it's me--Sakura-chan!"

Naruto blinked at her.

Sakura moved a bit to the side and motioned to him. Sasuke took a few steps forward, not understanding the situation, and Naruto's eyes shifted him. Sakura went on, still cheerful. "And that's--"

"Sasuke?"

Naruto's voice was as hazy as his gaze. Sasuke didn't know why everyone looked surprised when the blond spoke, but he didn't like it.

Sakura shook her head faintly, and then nodded. "Yep! Sasuke's back, remember?"

". . . cool," Naruto said, blinking again. He closed his eyes a moment later, squeezing them shut, and pressed a hand against his temple. "There was something . . . I was . . . before. . . . Shit."

"It's okay," Sakura said. "You'll probably remember in a while. You're just hungry."

"I am?"

"Yeah!" she said. "Remember, you're having dinner with me and Lee tonight, and you said you weren't going to eat so that you wouldn't ruin the taste of my cooking with that awful ramen."

Naruto tilted his head slightly. ". . . I like ramen."

Sakura put a hand on her hip and mock-glared at him. "You like my cooking more."

"Oh." He nodded, and then frowned. "Are you sure? I don't think so. . . ."

"You do _to_," Sakura snapped. Then she slipped an arm through Naruto's. "Come on, we're going to be late." She looked up at Tsunade. The woman nodded.

"Okay," Naruto said, and let Sakura lead him out towards the street. A man in a long cloak stood up from the edge of the courtyard and began to follow several dozen feet behind them.

". . . What happened?" Sasuke asked, watching as Sakura, Naruto, and the anbu walked away.

"It's a side effect of the ward," Tsunade said clinically. "Until he adjusts to the suppression it puts on him, he's disoriented and has a hard time recognizing anyone who isn't highly familiar to him." She was quiet for a moment, and watched as Sakura struggled to keep Naruto from swaying so much that he crashed into any of the other passerby.

When the two teenagers were obscured by a scaffold in front of a damaged building, Tsunade continued. "You're not being placed under anbu guard, because we need all we have. Kakashi has agreed to have you stay with him. I don't want you to go out in public without either him or someone else trustworthy--for your own good as well as for everyone's peace of mind. If you have any objections, I don't care."

She turned and walked away. Sasuke gave the minimum required bow and thank you before looking back to the spot where Sakura and Naruto had disappeared from view.

Kakashi stood there with him for half a minute. When Sasuke hadn't moved, the man looked at him and said, "He'll be okay tomorrow. And he'll be fine by the end of the week."

"Why was Sakura lying about all that stuff with dinner?"

Kakashi scratched the back of his head. "Well, the other side effect is that he seems to have mental fights with the fox demon whenever he has to readjust, and it can carry over out of his sleep. He's not so . . . destructive if he wakes up in a place he knows with people he recognizes. And Lee is capable of holding his own in a fight long enough for the anbu to show if something goes wrong."

Sasuke said nothing, and when the man looked over, he noticed that the teenager's hands were clenched into fists. Kakashi looked away again. "Naruto was probably aware of the consequences before the rest of us were."

Sasuke tensed slightly before shoving his hands into his pockets. "That _idiot_."

Kakashi glanced at him from the corner of his eye. "He made his choice of how to live. You should at least respect that."

Sasuke tensed more, but looked at the ground and said nothing.

Kakashi waited for several more long seconds, but the teenager remained silent. Finally, he turned to the left and began to walk toward the street.

"Did she give you a choice about guarding me?" Sasuke asked.

Kakashi paused, and, still facing the street, said, "Yes."

He started walking again, and heard Sasuke's footsteps following behind him.


	6. ripple 6: Kakashi

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

This was originally the second ending.

* * *

-

_Don't be defeated by DNA._

-

Naruto had just had the ward placed on him, so he was still too woozy to stay on his feet and was lying on the couch. Kakashi was left to stand while Tsunade spoke to him.

"Allowing the fox demon's tainted vessel and a missingnin sought by one of our worst enemies to live in the same apartment would create a riot, and I don't want to leave that boy alone. Besides, I doubt anyone in Konoha is willing to rent a place to him," Tsunade had said, before going on to inform Kakashi that she was placing Sasuke under his watch until further notice.

Kakashi reminded her that he'd been selected to train another genin team this year and asked if he was expected to keep guard over the teenager while dealing with them. Tsunade said that he was going to fail them anyway, so it shouldn't be that much of a trouble.

He had thought about it for a moment, and then said that he doubted his own landlord would look too favorably on him keeping a missingnin sought by one of their worst enemies in the building. Tsunade said that she would speak to him about it. Kakashi had refrained from raising an eyebrow and asked if she could get his rent lowered while she was at it.

Tsunade told him not to push his luck and go find the Uchiha brat.

When they were walking down the hallway to the outside door, however, she said in a voice low enough it was possible Naruto didn't overhear it through his dizziness: "Make it clear to him that he cannot leave the village unattended, not even to the training grounds. The anbu will have orders to kill him if he does."

Kakashi looked at her from the corner of his eye. "Is that necessary? I know Sasuke."

"And I know Orochimaru," she replied flatly. "Until he's dead, it is necessary. I've made enough exceptions for him; the rule is for missingnins to be killed."

Kakashi remembered the time when he had insisted on living by rules. But he had been young then, and too stupid to see what was most important.

That was not a wise thing to tell a Hokage nearly twice his age, so Kakashi only nodded and said, "Yes, Tsunade-sama."

If Sasuke was irritated when Kakashi warned him, he didn't say anything either; and there was no change in the sullen, distant expression that was the teenager's de facto mien. Kakashi took that as a sign that Sasuke would obey the rule, even if he didn't like it, and left things at that.

**-**

Kakashi had lived on his own ever since he moved out of his house at fourteen, the year he'd traded an eye for a sharingan, but living with Sasuke wasn't a drastic change. He was quiet, clean, and aside from the floor space that Kakashi lost to his futon, left as much of a mark on the place as a ghost.

He'd told Sasuke that he didn't have to sleep on the floor - as long as the teenager slept on the side of the bed that wasn't against the wall so _he_ would be the one to fall off, Kakashi didn't care - but Sasuke said he preferred it.

As Kakashi found out the first night, this was because Sasuke had nightmares.

He also found out that trying to rouse Sasuke from those nightmares would be hazardous to his health. When he moved to shake the teenager awake, Kakashi had only touched his arm before Sasuke was up and flung a pair of shurikan at him.

Kakashi was mildly grateful that he hadn't had his sharingan covered.

The teenager was staring at him blankly, dark eyes wide and muscles so tense that he was almost shaking, so Kakashi reached up and ruffled his hair. He watched a few strands fall to the ground, and noted that he hadn't moved aside fast enough.

"I keep meaning to get a haircut, but I never seem to get around to it when they're open . . ." he commented.

Sasuke, now that instinct was no longer overriding his thoughts, had the civility to look abashed. "Sorry," he muttered, looking away. ". . . It's a reflex." His hands tightened around the blanket for a moment, before he abruptly turned around and lay back down, facing the wall.

To anyone else, the gesture would have seemed rude - but Kakashi could guess how much effort it took for Sasuke to leave his back vulnerable like that. It was a sign of trust more than an apology, but it made the point.

Kakashi sighed inaudibly, worked one of the shurikans out of the wall and the other out of the doorframe, and set them beside Sasuke's pillow before going back to bed.

When he looked over a quarter of an hour later, the shurikans were hidden and Sasuke was sleeping with his back against the wall again.

**-**

He'd noticed the scars while putting the second seal on him - two long lines, parallel to Sasuke's spine, each over four inches wide and looking as though they had been reopened several times. When he'd asked Sasuke about them, the teenager only said they were a result of the curse seal. Kakashi never learned more until one of the days he was monitoring Sasuke and Naruto's sparring.

Whatever additional damage Orochimaru had done to Sasuke's already unstable mentality, Kakashi had to acknowledge that he trained the teenager well. It had been a while since he'd seen someone who could keep up with Naruto for extended periods of time, and Sasuke was fighting with much more detachment than before.

The two spent most of their days yelling at and fighting with each other and calling it training for lack of anything else to do. Kakashi had been returning from the third series of tests that his genin team was failing, and found them while crossing one of the training grounds. He'd sent the team back home, convinced the anbu guard that he could handle watching the two for a few hours, and settled on one of the posts to keep a vague eye out so neither of them would try to throw the other into a tree.

When he made them break apart for lunch, Kakashi thought there would be no harm in reading - the worst he expected was a food fight. That was why he hadn't been paying attention to what they were saying right until Naruto snapped, "Well, claws are better than wings!"

That made no damn sense, and thus attracted Kakashi's attention. There was a long silence, and finally Sasuke replied, "Yeah, right. Wings are more useful."

Kakashi raised the eyebrow hidden behind his forehead protector and turned a page.

"They are not! I bet you can't even fly with those things!"

"At least I can **hide** mine," Sasuke snapped.

Naruto bristled and stood up. "At least mine don't **hurt**!"

Kakashi closed his book.

Sasuke was glaring. "At least **I** wasn't stupid enough to !"

Naruto put his hands on his hips, and his smile was curled up just enough that his incisors were visible. "To _what_, Sasuke? Huh?"

"To completely fuck up my dreams and then talk about them like they're still possible!" Sasuke burst out, shoving himself onto his feet as well. "You who **still** keeps going on and on about being Hokage! Open your eyes - you and I are going to be genin for the rest of our _lives!_"

Kakashi jumped off the post.

Naruto laughed.

"You think I don't **know** that?" the blond said, folding his arms behind his head. "But if a guy like Lee can become a jounin, then I can still be Hokage."

"It's not the same thing," Sasuke said lowly, staring at him.

"So **what**?" Naruto snarled. His arms fell to his sides, the hands clenched into fists. "I **said** I'd be Hokage even if I **was** a genin all my life! Let _everyone_ underestimate my control over it, I don't _care!_ It's not gonna stop me, dammit!"

It was very quiet. Kakashi was watching their body language carefully and ready to move at the first sign of a fight, Naruto was glaring at Sasuke, and Sasuke was staring back.

Naruto finally glanced away first, looking over Sasuke's shoulder. He scratched the side of his head. "Besides, I'll be the first genin to **be** Hokage. No one's ever done _that_ before. Think how cool it'll be."

Sasuke's lips thinned slightly, before he closed his eyes and snorted. "You're the stupidest person I've ever met."

He took a step back, finally putting some space between him and the blond, and sat down next to his food again.

"And you're the biggest !"

"Shut up and eat, Naruto," Sasuke interrupted. "You're wasting time."

Naruto blinked at him a few times. Then he glanced over his shoulder at Kakashi, who was still standing; and finally he sat down and started eating the food that was now a little more dusty than before.

Kakashi moved back to his seat on the post and reopened his book, but didn't consider reading.

A few more minutes passed in silence, until Naruto muttered around a mouthful of cold rice: "Claws are still cooler than wings."

"Whatever," Sasuke replied.

**-**

That evening, Sasuke asked "Fight me with the sharingan."

Kakashi thought that was a spectacularly bad idea and told him so. Sasuke was silent for the rest of the night.

He was quiet all of the next day, too, speaking only when necessary, and for the beginning of the day after that as well.

Kakashi didn't give in because of the quiet - he'd lived alone for half his life, he was used to it; and Sasuke hadn't been the chattiest of roommates in the first place - but because he knew what was hiding behind the irritation the quiet was supposed to convey.

Even though Sasuke now slept with the blanket pulled over his head due to the weather and the fact that the floor was colder than the bed, Kakashi could tell that his nightmares had become worse. The first night, the same one that Sasuke had made his request, Kakashi sat up in his bed and listened to the hitched sound of the teenager's breathing as he cried in his sleep. The sound was very faint, nearly imperceptible, and muffled even further due to the blanket, but it was still there.

He knew that Sasuke would be shamed if he was revealed to be crying. That was the reason Kakashi stayed in the bed, despite the insistent voice that told him Sasuke had been left alone before and it had resulted in this.

Eventually Sasuke's breathing shifted to the slightly choked tone that signaled an attempt to breathe normally through tears, and Kakashi silently laid back down and closed his eyes.

After a few minutes, there was a rustle from the futon. He heard Sasuke pad across the floor, the click of a lock, and the soft splashing of water through the bathroom door.

Sasuke remained in the bathroom a long time after he'd shut the water off. When he did leave, he walked quickly across the room and slid back under his covers, pulling them over his head once more.

Kakashi remained awake until he was certain Sasuke was sleeping quietly.

He said nothing the next day - he was sure Sasuke had guessed that he'd been awake, but there was no reason to wound the teenager's pride further by confirming it. But over breakfast the morning after that, Kakashi asked: "Are you ready to go training?"

Sasuke paused. Then he looked up and said, "Don't you have a meeting with your team today?"

Kakashi frowned. "Do I? . . . Huh."

Sasuke snorted and took another drink of tea.

**-**

Kakashi was sure that the fight was going to leave him with a headache tomorrow. When Sasuke moved, he could see the motions the teenager was going to make and was able to block them; but Sasuke could see the motions he was going to block with and then shifted his attack, rendering them useless. Kakashi spent several minutes on the defense and avoided using any chakra until he got used to the rapidly altering images. It took him that long because it was compounded by the strangeness that always came when he had to see out of one normal eye and one eye that saw nothing but faint and vivid reds.

The first time they broke apart long enough to breathe and reassess their attacks, Sasuke said, "You know there's another form of the sharingan."

It was a way to bring up the topic rather than an actual question; Sasuke knew that Kakashi had been incapacitated the same way as him.

"The mangekyou," Kakashi agreed.

"Do you know how to attain it?"

Kakashi raised his eyebrow before remembering that it was no longer hidden by the forehead protector. "The Uchiha family guards their secrets almost as well as the Hyuuga," he replied. "I only know of it."

"I do," Sasuke replied, and attacked again.

Twenty minutes later, they broke apart again, and Kakashi could feel the pressure building behind his left temple. Hints of strain were beginning to show in Sasuke's face as well; but he was clearly just taking a break and not ready to end the fight, and Kakashi wanted to get this over with today rather than spend the next few weeks with migraines.

He was holding his own, but it wouldn't last: Sasuke had two eyes, and he had one. Sasuke had the Uchiha blood that the eye answered to, and Kakashi only had in himself the few drops that had come with the eye. And Sasuke simply cared more.

Kakashi watched the teenager regain his breath while still holding a defensive posture and checking for any offensive movements from himself, and wondered what it was like to fight in nothing but shades of red. He wondered what kind of effect it had on your mind.

"It takes special circumstances. You have to kill your closest friend," Sasuke said abruptly, and _that_ took a moment to sink in.

Kakashi's eyes widened. "Kill your closest. . . . Who told you that?"

The answer was obvious before he even finished the question. Sasuke's eyes flicked away for less than a second before refocusing on just Kakashi's sharingan.

He watched Sasuke's features go blank and calculating for the fight, revealing nothing else.

"Itachi lied to you," Kakashi said flatly.

The teenager narrowed his eyes, but before he could say anything, Kakashi smiled cheerfully, tapped the scar over his cheekbone, and continued. "_I've_ never attained it."

When he opened his eyes again, Sasuke was staring at him with an expression that was almost painful to see.

Kakashi didn't look away. He'd always looked straight back when people were disappointed by his father's death, by Rin's death, by the news of what had happened to Obito. If he stared long enough, he'd found that he could make them look aside first.

Sasuke was no different, and after a minute he glanced away.

Kakashi wondered if he would believe it. There were plenty of ways Sasuke could ignore his statement; he wasn't a part of the bloodline, and it had taken him two years of intense use and training just to move beyond the state that Obito had reached. Besides, he had very little understanding of the mangekyou, and no idea what Itachi had told Sasuke - it might have been the truth.

He hadn't killed Obito with his own hands, after all. He'd just been responsible for his death. It could be that the sharingan didn't acknowledge those as the same thing.

Kakashi waited for a while before taking a step to the side. When he did, Sasuke's gaze snapped back to him and he slid into a defensive stance. Kakashi accepted that the fight wasn't over and echoed the movements, waiting for Sasuke to attack first.

Sasuke was distracted for the first few minutes, so much so that Kakashi managed to land a solid kick to his stomach and send the teenager skidding along the ground. Sasuke quickly converted the motion into a roll, got back on his feet, crouched, and watched him.

Kakashi checked that he hadn't caused any real damage, and gave Sasuke a disapproving look for enabling him to get a hit.

When Sasuke attacked next, he was finally concentrating on the fight again, and deflected all Kakashi's blows while nearly landing a few of his own. Kakashi was glad - if he was going to have a migraine from this fight, it had better be for a good reason.

It quickly became obvious that Sasuke was fighting someone other than him. Kakashi finally teleported to avoid a flame and shurikan combination, and ducked to avoid the kunai that Sasuke had spun around and flung.

"I think that's enough training for today," Kakashi commented, straightening. "I'd like to see tomorrow. And I'm sure I'm expected meet my team at some point on the same day we have practice."

Sasuke was silent for several moments, pretending that he was catching his breath. He laughed shortly.

"You never showed up this late for us," he said. "Are they that bad?"

"There's no one as scathing as Sakura on this team," Kakashi replied. "They all actually have patience, unlike you three."

"'Patience,'" Sasuke repeated disbelievingly. "You're not passing them, are you?"

"Not if they fail the fourth tests," Kakashi replied.

He began the walk back to Konoha, and Sasuke fell in step beside him.

It would have been quicker to teleport, and easier on his already-taxed muscles, but the only times that Sasuke was able to leave Konoha's walls was when he went to the training grounds. So Kakashi - and Naruto, in his far-less-than-subtle way - walked, to give him more time outside.

The risk of being attacked by the Sound was very high, he knew; but if the protective measures laid on Sasuke became too smothering for the teenager to bear, Kakashi was sure that he would flee again. And this time coming back wouldn't be an option. Kakashi preferred the risk, since it countered the certainty.

Watching out for Sasuke was a headache in its own right, but Kakashi had known that three years ago, and it hadn't stopped him then, either.

Besides, Sasuke echoed enough of his own past that it wasn't difficult to navigate the boundaries and walls the teenager surrounded himself with. It wasn't easy, it was never easy to deal with a young genius, let alone one who had a great deal of inner strength resting on a prop that could easily be kicked away by the wrong name; but Kakashi had a vague comparison to draw on, so it wasn't difficult.

Even if there had been someone else capable of seeing past Sasuke's façade back then, or willing to look out for him now, they would make a fatal mistake from their lack of understanding. Kakashi was aware of this, and didn't allow the headache to stop him.

**-'-**

Despite the fights that they never apologized for, Sasuke and Naruto still spent a considerable amount of time together. Whenever they weren't training, they were usually with Sakura - and by default, Lee.

No matter what happened or what the rest of Konoha thought, Sasuke had realized that he would always be welcome at Sakura's. It wasn't something that he would allow himself to take advantage of, because that would admit too much, but he liked knowing it. It wasn't hard to let himself be dragged over there again and again by Naruto.

Besides, Lee's cooking was much better than Kakashi's. Kakashi lived off instant food, coffee, and toast. Sasuke would almost be willing to go to Sakura's even if she didn't want him, just to get vegetables.

He always thought of the apartment as "Sakura's," but in reality, it was Lee's. It was just easy to think it of it as hers, since she all but slept there.

One night, after nearly three weeks had passed and while they were walking back from escorting Sakura to her house (she had been given a curfew for non-mission nights, since she was the first of her family in two generations to be a ninja and her parents still insisted on a certain level of civilian respectability), Sasuke asked Naruto how long she and Lee had been together.

"Two years," he replied. "And three months."

Sasuke paused to consider that. Then the corners of his mouth curled up. "How many weeks?"

". . . shut up," Naruto muttered.

They walked in silence down another street, and Naruto started swinging his arms at his sides, restless.

"But they're happy," he said. "I think they'll be happy. . . . Hinata told me that Ino said they were thinking about getting married, when Lee's old enough to propose. I bet they are, but he just blushes and she always changes the subject when I ask."

Sasuke's gaze focused on the ground in the distance while he contemplated. "Lee still only has taijutsu?"

"Yeah," Naruto said, dropping his voice slightly. ". . . And Tsunade usually keeps Sakura-chan on chuunin and jounin teams, but with all the recent shit with the Sound she's gone with some of the anbu. She's too good not to."

Sasuke's contemplating frown deepened just enough to become a faint glare. They walked several more blocks.

". . . They'll be happy," Naruto said.

Sasuke didn't disagree.

**-**

He left Naruto at his apartment and, since he technically wasn't allowed to walk the streets by himself, teleported back to Kakashi's.

Naruto sucked at the teleport jutsu now that he had to actually maintain chakra precisely, and Sasuke heard him yell "Showoff!" just before he disappeared.

**-'-**

Kakashi blinked when Sasuke appeared in the middle of the room, but didn't look up from his book. "Is it raining?"

"I didn't feel like being followed," Sasuke replied flatly as he walked back to the entrance.

The anbu would be knocking in several minutes, Kakashi noted.

While Sasuke was taking off his sandals and setting them by the door, he asked, "Are they sending Sakura out with anbu teams?"

Kakashi looked over at him. "Yes."

"Why?"

"Because we have a shortage of medical ninjas," he replied, stating the obvious. "And Tsunade-sama isn't the type to shelter people."

"And she and Lee are both fine with it."

"It's the life we've all chosen," Kakashi replied, looking back to his book.

Several moments later, he watched Sasuke's feet go past as he walked to the window ledge and sat down. The teenager stared out into the alley that led to the street.

"She's not annoying when she doesn't think she's in love with me," Sasuke told him, looking out the window. "She's . . . a good friend."

Kakashi's expression wasn't visible through the mask.

The apartment was quiet for a little while. An anbu started to walk down the alley, then saw Sasuke at the window and left again. Kakashi finished the book, but he could tell that Sasuke still had something to say, so he flipped back to his favorite section and waited for the teenager to figure out what it was.

"I never **asked** him to come after me," Sasuke said, so quietly that the violence in his tone almost wasn't audible. "It's stupid. I never pretended this place was anything but a way to learn. I never gave them . . . I never gave _any_one a reason to think otherwise."

Kakashi closed the book and looked over. Sasuke was still glaring out the window, so Kakashi stared at his reflection until he finally turned to face him.

He wondered how long it was going to take the teenager to accept that he had people who cared about him again, and said: "That's the point of having comrades, Sasuke. You don't have to ask."

When Sasuke stared at him, the desperation to believe that was hidden so well behind those dark bangs made Kakashi suspect it would be years. At the least.

Sasuke looked away from him, looked at the two picture frames that sat on the shelf above his bed, and looked out the window again.

". . . Why did you kill him?" Sasuke finally asked.

He looked up at the picture frame. "Because I was a fool back then."

"And you're not anymore?"

The corner of Kakashi's mouth twitched upwards. "I'd like to think so. . . ."

Sasuke didn't reply, not even with a snort, and soon quiet settled in the apartment again.

It wasn't a peaceful quiet - it was permeated with nightmares and emotions that felt like they couldn't be changed and words that were painful to say. And headaches. Many, many headaches.

But Kakashi was getting used to the headaches again. He'd had a permanent one for two years and eight months, when every morning that he woke up and saw the sharingan in the mirror he would remember he'd failed Sasuke. The only difference between that headache and these was that he had a tangible source again. And he could actually do something about them.

Even if it took years, Kakashi would be there until the quiet was finally peaceful.


	7. ripple 7: the Soundnins

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

I am in complete denial about Tayuya being dead. Only the lower half of her body was crushed - if a retrieval team was sent out relatively soon after Sasuke showed up at the Sound, there's a _fraction_ of a chance she might have lived. Really.  
——————

**-'**

Two weeks later, the Sound attacked again.

They were subtler this time, since their numbers were running low. They were also bolder, because Orochimaru had decided Sasuke had no intention of coming back on his own.

So rather than sending two large groups of shinobi, like last time, he sent the Sound's new Four instead: Sasuke's old teammates.

They attacked during the day, while Sasuke and Naruto were at one of the training grounds.

The anbu who'd been with them was killed first, unable to withstand four people who were at curse seal level one. Sasuke and Naruto put up a good fight, but then the four went to level two, and then they managed to place a seal around Naruto, and then things went bad.

Sasuke had picked off the second-weakest of the four while he was distracted with creating the seal--Koushun was currently dying from the chidori several meters to his left.

He'd wasted his second chidori attack trying to hit Kazuo--which had been _stupid_, he should have gone after Setona, but . . . hindsight.

His gaze flicked from Koushun's curled up form to the opposite side of his peripheral vision, where Naruto was cursing and kicking at the invisible walls of his seal, before focusing on the three remaining Soundnins before him.

Tayuya was standing in front, and swearing more than Naruto and yanking a shurikan from her upper arm with a grimace. The extensive scars along her legs were still visible beneath the coloring of the second level.

"Fight us for real, coward," she said flatly.

Setona said under his breath, "Tayuya, we're supposed to bring him back un--"

"Fuck that!" Tayuya yelled to him without looking away. "I'm not taking a goddamn **weakling** to be Orochimaru-sama's container! Just _look_ at you," she added, increasing her glare. "Relying on the same old crap they taught you before you came to us. You **know** that useless shit isn't good enough--now fight, or I'll kill you!"

Sasuke kept his gaze focused on Tayuya. Setona was shifting slightly towards her. Kazuo was watching the seal, cradling his bleeding arm that one of Naruto's clones had ripped up with a kunai against his bleeding chest, which two others had done. On his left, Koushun was no longer twitching. On his right, Naruto had stopped kicking at the walls and was staring at him.

"Or are you 'still not good enough yet, Sasuke-kun'?" she added.

Sasuke's eyes narrowed slightly, before he let the corners of his mouth twist upward.

"Fine," he said, and willed the curse seal to overpower Kakashi's restraining one. The seal slithered down his left arm and up to his face immediately, warm and invigorating. "Since you **want** to die. . . ."

Tayuya snorted.

Level one of the seal had to be in place for a few moments before level two could be activated, but the Soundnins were courteous enough to wait. Sasuke thought back to the moment he'd 'died,' when his body had _changed_ permanently, and strained to bring that feeling back.

What happened next was too fast, too simultaneous, that it wasn't until later when he had time to sort things into order that he fully understood what had occurred.

_That_ chakra exploded into his senses, at the same time that Kazuo yelled "Ta--!", at the same time that a dark orange blur slammed into Tayuya and took her and itself out of his line of sight.

Sasuke instinctively shoved himself **up**, out of reach, out of immediate danger, and landed on one of the upper branches of a nearby tree.

Tayuya screamed, a high pained sound that choked off when the fox-Naruto flung her away from him. A string of intestines, dark and slick-looking in the filtered sunlight, trailed out behind until Naruto let go of them. Her body smashed into the trunk of a tree and sank to the ground.

Sasuke swallowed once, staring, and then bit his thumb hard.

He pressed his palm against the branch and concentrated as much chakra as he was willing to lose into it, drawing on the curse seal to replace what he'd lost with the chidori. _Focus, focus, you need the right one_. . . . "Animal summoning!"

His hand was shoved up a good fifteen centimeters, and the rough bark was replaced with slick scales.

A cobra lifted its head and looked at him with a mildly annoyed expression. "You again."

The wrong one. **Damn** it; he hadn't concentrated hard enough.

Below, Naruto was crouched next to Tayuya, probably making sure that she was dead. Sasuke could see Kazuo in the trees to his right, but it was too far to make out more than his movements with the sharingan. Setona was nowhere in sight, which meant he must have already hidden himself in an illusion.

The cobra looked down at Naruto and let out a quiet hiss that could have been a laugh. "You got into a real mess this time, huh, child?" It wrapped itself around Sasuke's thigh and stretched up past his shoulder, watching Naruto's gaze search the trees. "Best run away. You don't stand a chance."

Sasuke didn't like the snakes. There was one that liked him and would actually obey his orders--the rest were assholes.

"No," he replied.

Another hissed laugh. "No, it wouldn't be smart to run from _that_ one."

Kazuo burst out from the trees. He landed against the trunk of one behind Naruto, swung around it and shoved off with his feet before hitting a tree to the right. His level two form granted him an almost insane speed--Naruto hadn't fully turned around before Kazuo had almost circled him.

Sasuke followed his movements with the sharingan; and when he saw that Kazuo going to swing around again and go for the tree opposite himself once more, he recognized the move. Kazuo was trailing thin, razor-sharp wires behind him, caging the other teenager in; but they were only to keep Naruto distracted and slowed down enough that Setona could work a genjutsu.

At level two, Setona's illusions might be enough to confuse even the fox demon. . . .

And because of those damn illusions, he couldn't see the other teenager, not even with the sharingan. _If I had the mangekyou. . . ._

"Nahash-san," Sasuke said. "Do you see a boy around here?"

"There's two down there. I thought you had special eyes, child," the cobra replied.

He **really** didn't like the snakes. "With dark blue hair. He's hidden behind a genjutsu."

Nahash actually looked around instead of smarting off again. Sasuke suspected it was because Naruto's chakra had just split apart from his body and grabbed Kazuo's leg before he could reach another tree. It flung the teenager to the side, and he slammed into one of his wires, tearing a long line across the side of his torso. "That would be the one two trees to your left."

"Go kill him," Sasuke said, and Nahash uncurled from his leg and left. He hoped the cobra was really listening and not just running off, but there was no time to dwell on it--Kazuo's next move was going to be jumping onto his branch.

Stupid . . . but then, Sasuke had kept the actual mechanics of his sharingan a secret. Only Orochimaru, Kabuto, and Tayuya would have known better.

When Kazuo jumped over the grasp of Naruto and Naruto's chakra, he only got one foot onto the branch before Sasuke had a kunai buried in his throat and a second one in his stomach.

He stared into Kazuo's wide gray eyes with narrowed red ones, and then wrenched the kunai in his throat to the left and the one in his stomach to the right.

The one in Kazuo's throat came out cleanly, splattering blood across Sasuke's face with it, but the other one became wedged in the mush of the organs. When that dark orange chakra wrapped around Kazuo's leg again and pulled, Sasuke let the second kunai go and watched it crash with the other teenager to the ground. Kazuo's body hit one of the wires on the way, bisecting his leg. It also sliced away part of the chakra, inciting a deep and unmistakably inhuman growl from Naruto.

That left him with the bloody kunai in his left hand, and the two remaining in his pouch. He'd used all his shurikan on Tayuya, and he hadn't brought any wire with him today. _Shit_.

When had he started getting so **careless** again?

There was a rustle to the left, a short scream, the sound of ripping flesh, and then Setona's body fell out of the trees. When he hit the ground, Sasuke could see that there was only a bloody, pulped mess where his throat was supposed to be.

Naruto gave the body a cursory glance before looking up at him. He snapped his hand to the side, flicking some of the gore off, and smiled wide enough to show off his incisors.

"Come down," the fox-Naruto said.

If Sasuke hadn't spent the last three years with Orochimaru, the undercurrent in his voice would have made him shiver.

"Or run," the fox added, grinning wider.

_. . . he's not there at all_, Sasuke slowly realized. This wasn't Naruto using the fox demon's chakra--this was the fox demon using Naruto's body.

**_Shit_**.

When he'd 'died,' it had felt like being on fire--like misdirecting the great fireball jutsu and getting caught in it as a result. Only it had been very cold.

The purple haze at the edges of his vision slipped away, replaced by a heavy gray.

Sasuke dug his fingers into the bark of the branch as the second level closed over him, and he grit his teeth when the scars on his back were torn open yet again, but he didn't look away from the fox.

Naruto grinned wider--too wide, human mouths couldn't _go_ that wide--and crouched. He was going to jump on the branch.

Sasuke shoved himself off, far to the right, knowing it wouldn't be far enough to account for the fox's chakra's mobility.

And it wasn't--he felt it grab his shin and yank him in the opposite direction before letting go.

Sasuke wrapped the wings around himself, leaving them to take the majority of the impact when he slammed into a tree trunk. But it still jarred him, and he fell before he could think to get a good foothold on anything, hitting the ground painfully. The impact twisted his leg underneath him, and he couldn't get back onto his feet soon enough--_too slow, too **slow**!_

He wrenched the wings away from him, kunai still in hand. The blade had cut into one of them when he'd curled it in, but there was no time to _care_, it was going to _attack_. . . .

Except it wasn't. The fox's claws were gouged into the dirt, and it was staring down at the ground, more bent than crouched now. It wasn't looking at him.

Sasuke took the opportunity to jerk the remaining two kunai out of his pouch. He gripped them between the fingers of his other hand, and watched the fox warily.

The blond twitched once. Sasuke set his footing and brought his arms back to throw the kunai.

"I _said **not **_**him**!" Naruto yelled at the top of his lungs, and then the bitter chakra faded.

There was a moment of quiet.

Sasuke kept the kunai up. Naruto was breathing heavily.

Finally, the other teenager lifted his head enough to look at his hands. "Asshole," he muttered, before reaching up to wipe away a trickle of blood where his incisor had cut his lip.

Sasuke waited for two more long seconds. Then he let his breath out through his teeth, and dropped his arms. He braced one hand on the ground, shifting to take the weight off of the leg he'd damaged in his fall.

Naruto looked over at him. "You okay?"

"_Fine_," Sasuke replied, with as much sarcasm and condescension as he could possibly force into the word. Naruto made a face at him.

"Your arm's burnt," Sasuke pointed out a few moments later.

Naruto looked down at the hand where the chakra had been separating from. "Doesn't hurt yet."

Sasuke would have snorted, but that was too difficult to do while breathing through his mouth. He made an insulting noise in the back of his throat instead.

Naruto glared at him, but was too preoccupied with slowing his heartbeat down to exert the energy getting vocally mad would require.

Naruto was breathing through his mouth as well--it cut down on the stench. Sasuke's eyes fell on the trail of intestines running behind the other teenager, and he followed it up to Tayuya's still form. She'd fallen face-down, but her head was tilted enough that he could see her eyes were blank. If she hadn't been dead when Naruto threw her, she was now.

He stared for too long--Naruto frowned and looked behind him as well.

When he looked back, Sasuke's eyes were closed and he was forcing the level two curse seal down.

Naruto's frown deepened, and he shifted on his feet. "Hey," he started to say, "you. . . ."

Then the anbu and jounin arrived.

—

They weren't brought to the hospital. Once it was determined that neither of them were critically wounded, they were led to the Hokage's tower.

Sasuke wondered if they were more nervous about having Naruto or him in the public building.

He could have complained--Naruto did--since the tower was farther away than the hospital, but Sasuke refused to announce his weakness. He could still walk, and walk steadily enough that it wasn't obvious how much the second level of the curse drained him, and that was enough.

It also helped that Kakashi was keeping a hand on his shoulder, and subtly preventing him from stumbling.

Sasuke didn't know whether he'd managed to force the seal down before the man had gotten close enough to see him, but he pretended he had.

—

On the second floor of the tower, there was a room set just off the main hallway that contained four beds and a collection of various scrolls and medical equipment. It was a combination of a training space for medical ninjas and a backup emergency room.

He and Naruto were in there, along with Sakura, who had finished wrapping Naruto's right hand and was now examining Sasuke's leg, and Tsunade.

The fifth Hokage was sitting in a chair against the wall, arms folded beneath her breasts. She hadn't spoken since she walked into the room, sat down and told Sakura to look over their injuries. Sasuke had closed his eyes several minutes ago, because he was too tired to pretend that he could keep them open, but he was sure that she was still watching the three of them with that impassive expression.

Even Naruto had fallen quiet when she walked in, so Sasuke wasn't looking forward to when Tsunade decided her anger was controlled enough that she could speak.

"You should be okay," Sakura murmured, though her voice still came out loud in the silence. "You pulled the muscles, but nothing's sprained or broken. They should be fine by tomorrow or the day after, but I can heal them now?"

"I'm fine," Sasuke replied. "Don't waste your chakra on something so minor."

There was a pause, and he had the suspicion that she rolled her eyes. "Fine," Sakura said with a you-stupid-macho-guy undertone. There was a shift on the mattress when she moved away from his leg to settle behind him. "That just leaves these to fix, and then--"

Sasuke shuddered violently when she lightly touched the raw patches on his back, and jerked away. He stood up and walked around to the third bed in the room, and sat down on the edge, glaring at the floor.

Sakura stared at him, her hand still hesitantly raised in the air. When he wouldn't look up, she let it drop to her lap and looked away. She tucked one leg beneath her, intertwined her fingers, and like Naruto and Sasuke, waited.

Tsunade remained silent for another minute and a half. The pause was long enough that Sasuke collected himself and shifted his gaze from the floor to her, though he modified the glare to a blank stare that bordered on insolent.

Tsunade ignored him. When she finally spoke, it was to Naruto.

"You realize you've frightened the village."

"Sorry," he mumbled under his breath.

"You can't just **do** that, Naruto."

"I didn't have a choice!" he said defensively, finally looking up at her. "That psycho girl, Sasuke was gonna listen to her, and I had to, to. . . ." He exhaled heavily.

Tsunade glanced from the corner of her eye at Sasuke. His expression hadn't changed.

"I could've kept better control over it, but I was trapped," Naruto said, less loudly. "It . . . I dunno, used that. Somehow. I thought I had a better grip."

That was not something Tsunade had looked forward to hearing. She exhaled harshly before she could think about it, and kept her arms folded.

"This is why you aren't allowed to go on missions with Sakura anymore," Tsunade said evenly. "The ward is useless if you're going to throw it off every time one of your companions is in danger. You **have** to have better self-control, Naruto. I don't. . . ."

_I don't want to be forced to. . . . Not now, not yet, not so young_. . . .

"I know," he said quietly. "Sorry. I won't--. . . I'll try not to do it anymore." He scratched the back of his head. "This was stupid, anyway--they weren't half as strong as the old ones."

"A third," Sasuke replied. "Orochimaru hadn't found suitable replacements yet. These guys sucked in comparison."

Still that blank look from him. Sakura's hands fidgeted in her lap.

Naruto nodded in agreement, and said, "Yeah. We could have beaten them on our own, if you hadn't decided to be a dumbass and fall for her goading."

"Better than being an idiot who gets trapped in an _obvious_ seal."

"**Guys**," Sakura said loudly.

Naruto settled for glaring at Sasuke over her shoulder. Sasuke sneered slightly and closed his eyes again, so Naruto pulled down his eyelid and stuck his tongue out at him before looking away.

"Hn," Tsunade finally replied. "Naruto, go get your ward from the forest--and you _better not have broken it_--and then, I want you to spend the night at Lee's. Sakura, you'll walk him there?"

"Sure!" she said. ". . . Um . . . I could, if it's necessary, I don't mind. . . ."

Tsunade carefully refrained from smiling--Naruto's half-snicker was enough. "If you can afford to stay over as well, that would be helpful."

"Yes, ma'am!" She stood.

"Aw, Tsunade, just let him go sleep," came Jiraiya's voice from the doorway. "If he's been quiet for this long, he's getting sick."

"Yah!" Naruto yelled in surprise, scrambling back on the bed slightly and pointing. "Pervert sennin! You--stop just showing up like that!"

"Hey, quit calling me that," Jiraiya replied, stepping into the room. "Call me 'gallant Jiraiya-sensei,' you disrespectful brat."

Naruto folded his arms, a little more gingerly than usual because of the bandages, and stuck out his tongue. "If I called you sensei, people'd think I was crazy."

"Or that you'd finally learned manners," Sakura added, leaning against the bed with a hand on her hip.

"Same thing," Sasuke commented before Naruto could reply.

Naruto made a rude hand motion towards him. "**You're** one to talk!"

"_Out_," Tsunade interrupted. "Take Uchiha to Kakashi's, and then go home. The ward can wait until tomorrow. I have other business to deal with."

Amid mumbled "Yes"es, the three all got onto their feet and left the room.

Naruto was barely a meter down the hall before he cheerfully crowed, "Alright! I don't have to wear that stupid thing 'til tomorrow!"

"Don't sound so happy about it!" Sakura said in an annoyed tone.

Jiraiya watched the three walk down the hallway. "Ever get the feeling déjà vu is beating you over the head?"

Tsunade snorted and crossed her legs. "I didn't bother trying to stop you guys' fights," she replied. ". . . And I hit you more."

Jiraiya let out a long-suffering sigh as he sat down on one of the beds. "Heartless to me even then, Tsunade-hime. . . ."

When he trailed off, they could hear Sakura's voice further down the hallway.

"--talk about him in front of her."

"She doesn't like me," Sasuke said flatly. "What I do or don't say won't change that."

"That doesn't mean you need to invite trouble."

"She's only doing her job, Sakura-chan."

"I know, but she _likes_ you."

"It won't make a difference," Naruto replied. "The Hokage has to look out for Konoha first, even if that means. . . ."

". . . Just don't say his name," Sakura said, and her voice was quieter not just because of the distance. "Maybe . . . if--"

"Fine," Sasuke said, and there was the sound of a door opening.

"I don't like it," Tsunade said, wanting to drown out the unspoken part of Naruto's comment. "Sakura was really growing into her own. But now that Uchiha's returned, she's letting herself be dragged into being the balance between those two again. It's a waste."

"Do you know if she considers it 'dragging'?" Jiraiya asked, doing that occasional thing of his that Tsunade hated, where he was an intuitive smartass.

She pushed the door beside her shut. "What did you learn?"

"Akatsuki is still after him. And since their Ashibe hasn't returned by now, they've assumed we caught and killed him." Jiraiya braced a foot on the bed frame and rested his arm on his knee. "I don't know whether they think we got anything out of him, but we're better off not assuming that they underestimate your skills."

"Hn," was all Tsunade said.

"However," he added. "They've been holding off, probably waiting for the Sound to weaken us before coming in--but if they learn that Naruto was caught up in this attempt to get Sasuke, they're not going to wait anymore."

Tsunade leaned back, resting an arm on the back of the chair. "I can't put any more guards over him without it getting suspicious. Even if we kept them separate. . . ."

"Even if we kept them separate, it would just mean that half the village would end up fighting the Sound, and the other half would get decimated by Akatsuki," Jiraiya said blandly.

Tsunade swore under her breath for several seconds.

Jiraiya looked at the door. "We should have killed him before this happened," he said. "The fourth Hokage was my student . . . I should have taken the responsibility."

Tsunade shifted in her chair. "Maybe if you just hadn't taught him to rely on **that** chakra. He _shouldn't_ call you sensei."

"I meant before we wound up caring," Jiraiya replied. "He was supposed to be Konoha's best weapon, in case that war revived. But it didn't, so Sarutobi-sensei should have . . . _I_ should have. . . ."

He trailed off, and Tsunade didn't say anything in reply. Her gaze slipped over Jiraiya's shoulder to the wall.

"Stupid brat," he muttered.

—

Sakura had to stop in Tsunade's office to pick up a packet that she'd left behind in the rush, but after that the three of them met Kakashi in the first floor hallway and made their way to his apartment.

The man suggested walking Sakura and Naruto to Lee's first, but the shirt Sasuke was wearing was still torn, and she was worried about him getting an infection. When they arrived at his home, he again offered to walk them there, but Sakura shook her head.

Naruto said nothing; he just slouched against the wall and kicked the step absently. Sasuke wondered what the hell was wrong now, until Sakura spoke and it became obvious.

"There won't be a problem, Kakashi-sensei," she said reassuringly. "Lee and I can take turns staying up. And, we'll have an anbu member there--if anyone tries to hurt us, he'll stop them. We'll be okay."

Kakashi didn't look satisfied, so Sakura added, "We'll take the back streets there. Hardly anyone will see us, I promise."

"Teleport," Sasuke said shortly. "People are stupider in mobs."

Naruto hunched in a little more. Sakura pressed her lips together slightly, then nodded.

Then she paused, frowned, and said, "Wait, Sasuke, did you or Naruto have lunch before you got attacked?"

"Nuh-uh!" Naruto answered, finally looking up from the floor and smiling a little too brightly. "So can we have ramen when we get back?" he added.

Sakura shrugged. "Lee is out training with his team until dark, so I could just make something for everyone . . . Kakashi-sensei, did you eat yet?"

"Not much."

"Do you have anything that's edible?"

". . . I suppose that depends on your definition. . . ."

"There's rice in the cabinet," Sasuke answered. "It's the only thing besides the coffee that hasn't expired yet."

Sakura made a face. "Eww, how can you live like that?"

"The bread's still good," Kakashi said in his defense.

"We ate the last of it for breakfast."

". . . Huh, yeah."

"Ramen is better than rice," Naruto offered.

Sakura was already walking toward the kitchen area. "Your opinion on food doesn't count, Naruto."

"Meeeeean, Sakura-chan!"

"Kakashi-sensei, don't you have any cooking pots? . . . Or bowls?"

"Under the sink," Sasuke said as he walked into the bedroom and shut the door.

—

Sakura managed to make lunch for the four of them despite having only rice, water, and one good egg. (She really wanted to know how someone with Kakashi's sense of smell could ignore the fact that the other five were rotten.) She hunted down three bowls and a plate, warned Kakashi that he needed to go shopping that night before the two of them starved, and kicked Naruto to the other side of the room when he started hovering around the stove.

Sasuke had changed shirts while she was cooking, and washed the blood off of his face. The thought of fabric rubbing those uncovered wounds on his back made Sakura wince internally, but she didn't say anything.

She set Kakashi and Naruto's bowls in front of them, then Sasuke's, and settled down at the small table with the plate.

"Thanks for the food," Naruto mumbled, busy trying to use his chopsticks with his left hand. She and Kakashi repeated the statement.

Sasuke picked up his own bowl and chopsticks. "Thanks for the--"

He paused, lifted the bowl a little closer to his nose, and then looked across the table at her.

Sakura swallowed before speaking. She scraped together more of the rice--it wasn't sticking very well--with her chopsticks, focusing on the plate as she said, "It's a sedative. It'll put you to sleep for a while, to give your back a chance to heal."

"Huh?" Naruto said, looking between them. Kakashi continued eating.

Sasuke stared at the bowl with an unreadable expression, resting his chopsticks on the rim. After almost fifteen seconds passed, he picked them up and silently began to eat.

Four minutes later he was asleep, face hidden in his arms on the tabletop. Naruto stared from where he'd given up on the chopsticks and started eating with his hand, both eyebrows raised. "Wow, Sakura-chan, what'd you _give_ him?"

"A really strong sedative," she answered, finishing the last of her rice and setting the chopsticks aside. "I could have used a less powerful one, and he might not have noticed it, but . . . that wouldn't have been right."

Kakashi set his chopsticks across his bowl before wiping his mouth and pulling his mask back up. "Even I haven't asked that much from him," he said evenly.

Sakura nodded. "I know. . . . But if he won't trust us, there's not. . . ." She bit her lip slightly, then shook her head and stood up. "Can I borrow a scroll and some ink from you?"

Kakashi stood as well. "I should have a couple blank ones left on that shelf." He picked Sasuke up beneath his arms, careful to avoid touching the teenager's back. "Where do you want him?"

"Wherever he sleeps, I guess, please," she answered, rummaging through the scrolls. "Then you won't have to move him later."

Kakashi hauled Sasuke off to the bedroom.

Sakura found a blank scroll, unrolled it on the floor, and set a brush and a quarter-empty pot of ink from the second shelf beside it.

Naruto was still sitting at the table, but he'd pushed all the bowls over enough that he could rest his elbows on it. He watched her carefully draw a circle in the middle of the paper, licking a few stray grains of rice off his hand.

"**I** stayed here," he sulked. "It sucks and lots of people are assholes, but **I** don't think about leaving."

"That's a stupid analogy, Naruto," Sakura said.

He folded his arms on the table and scooted back enough to rest his chin on them, watching her hands.

Sakura dipped the brush into the ink again, and then paused.

"The dream you're chasing is here," she said quietly. "But the dream he's chasing is walking around out there. Forcing him to stay is like demanding you leave."

Naruto didn't reply, and Sakura sighed violently.

". . . It doesn't mean that you're not strong for staying here, okay? If--if I were in your place, I don't know if. . . . It just means that you can't compare yourselves," she finished. "Nothing good happens when you do, dammit. Naruto is Naruto. Sasuke is Sasuke. You have different goals."

She swished the brush around in the ink a few times in the following silence, before tapping it on the rim so none would drip onto the scroll or Kakashi's floor.

". . . I got stronger," Naruto said quietly. ". . . We both did." He mumbled something she couldn't hear, before adding, "I bet I would've worked hard to deserve his approval if he'd ever given it, but not as hard as I did just to get the jerk to acknowledge me."

He trailed off then, waiting for her to reply.

Sakura knew if she looked up and saw Naruto's pale red eyes staring at her through his bangs, she would ask: _At what cost?_

So she didn't say anything, and began writing the first of the lines out from the circle.

Naruto shifted on the table a few moments later, then sat up again and propped his chin on his fists, still watching her write. "If he leaves, and I hunt him down and break his legs and bring him back again, you'll heal them, right? So nobody gets suspicious and stuff?"

Sakura laughed once, more startled and relieved than amused. Then she shook her head and continued writing the lines. "Yes, Naruto, I'll heal his legs. And then I'll heal **your** ribs when he breaks them in retaliation."

"Okay. 'Cause I won't feel bad about doing it, knowing that," Naruto told her.

Sakura laughed slightly again, under her breath. "You wouldn't have felt bad anyway."

"I would a **little**!" he protested.

"Uh-_huh_."

Sakura's head was bent over the scroll, but Naruto could see that she was smiling slightly again, so he let her have the last word.


	8. ripple 8: Orochimaru

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.  
——————

**-'**

When Sasuke left the Hidden Sound village, he took five things with him: the clothes on his back, some money, a vastly increased knowledge of forbidden jutsus and attacks, a general distrust of humanity, and a katana.

When he left the Hidden Leaf village for the second time, he took three things: the clothes on his back, a general distrust of humanity with a few growing exceptions, and a katana.

The katana had been a gift from Orochimaru. Sasuke kept it hidden, even after six weeks of living at Kakashi's. He knew the man wouldn't ask for an explanation; obviously, it was a good sword, well-balanced, not so new as to be untested, and Sasuke managed to keep it sharp. But he would still _know_, where and who it came from.

Moving it had been most of the trouble, since hiding a change of clothes in the bathroom was simple. The morning of the day he left, Sasuke stashed those into a corner of the cabinet, behind the out-of-date bathroom cleaners, when he went to wash up for the day. That evening while Kakashi was out buying coffee (Sasuke had been careful about throwing the beans away and doubted the man had noticed that the can was unreasonably lower than it had been three days ago), he wedged the katana in as well and hoped Kakashi wouldn't get the urge to clean anything in the next few hours.

That night, Sasuke got up after he was almost sure Kakashi was sleeping, walked to the bathroom, dressed while the toilet was flushing to cover any noise, strapped the katana to his back while the faucet was running, and then turned off the water and teleported two kilometers to the northwest of Konoha's walls.

He could have gone closer to Orochimaru's location, but Sasuke wanted time to think while moving.

He regretted that decision several minutes later, when he realized that someone was following him and rapidly getting closer.

If it were anyone else, Sasuke would have assumed that a tracking device had been placed on him without his noticing. Naruto's ability to hunt him down no matter where he was was unnerving.

He kept moving forward, glaring into the darkness. It was a quarter moon, and the faint light was mostly blocked by the overhead branches.

When Naruto was only a dozen meters behind him--_so **fast**_, he thought absently, _how can he even keep traction at that speed?_--Sasuke leapt from a branch to the ground. Then he stopped and drew the katana from its sheath. He didn't turn around until he heard the grass crunch beneath Naruto's feet behind him.

He brought the sword up as he turned, torso-level and perpendicular to himself, in a basic blocking position. Naruto ignored it and gave him a look that Sasuke assumed, were the light willing, was meant to make him shrivel up and die where he stood.

Sasuke was better at those looks than Naruto, but he kept his own features blank save for a trace of irritation at being slowed down.

"They'll kill you if you're found out here alone," Naruto finally said.

"I know that," Sasuke replied flatly.

"_Idiot_."

"It wasn't a problem until **you** decided to show up--you're the one with the anbu guarding you night and day."

"They won't be here for a while. I can run faster than them." Naruto paused, then added, "There's still enough time to go back, and they won't notice."

"I'm not going back."

"Why not, huh? If you wanna die, **I'll** kick your ass to hell for you."

"Orochimaru is out here."

There was a brief silence. Then Naruto nodded and walked closer. Sasuke's grip tightened on the hilt.

"You know, at first a lot of people said you were here as a spy," Naruto told him. "Me and Sakura-chan kept arguing with them until the hag finally said Orochimaru enough of an idiot to send _you_ back _here_ if he needed a spy."

"Get to the point, dumbass."

Naruto was staring right at his eyes. "I don't think you're a spy. So what I wanna know, is why the fuck did you come back with me," he asked, folding his hands and stretching his arms in front of him, popping the knuckles, "if you were going to do this to us?"

When he didn't reply, Naruto flexed his hands and growled. "**Asshole**. Saying he's out there, talking about going back like--"

Sasuke interrupted in a voice glazed with condescension. "I'm going to kill him. Now go the hell away before the anbu catch up to you," he said. "You're wasting my time."

_That_ shut Naruto up.

But only for a few seconds. "Do you think you can?"

Sasuke snorted, relaxing his grip and sliding the katana back into its sheath. "Yes."

Naruto nodded again. "All right, let's go. Where's he at?"

Sasuke abruptly wished he'd kept the sword out. "Hell no," he replied. "I don't want you around."

"Screw you!" Naruto replied, grinding a fist into his hand and grinning. "I owe Kabuto an ass-kicking, and I bet he's there too, right?" He didn't wait for Sasuke's reply before continuing: "You can **have** the snake bastard if you're gonna be picky."

Sasuke glared, and Naruto's grin widened. "Besides," he added cheerfully, "you're gonna need someone to say that you didn't leave Konoha alone, right? Bet those anbu are getting pretty close while we're wasting time here."

Sasuke paused. Then he muttered a string of insults that would have befit Tayuya and turned around. "Don't fall behind," he said shortly, before jumping onto another branch and taking off.

Naruto caught up in a few heartbeats, of course--he was even deliberately moving slower in order to keep pace--but Sasuke ignored that minor fact.

They were a couple dozen meters further into the forest when Naruto said, "I'm glad I didn't have to drag you back. Sakura'd be pissed if I made her re-set your legs tonight."

There was an odd emphasis on the 'tonight,' but Sasuke had no opportunity to ask as pride dictated he reply to the other half of the sentence. "You couldn't break my legs if you tried, dead last."

"Could too! I nearly did before."

"That didn't count."

"The hell it didn't count!"

"Shut up," Sasuke said calmly, "we're not trying to warn them that we're coming."

"It did too count," Naruto snapped, quieter.

"Did not."

They continued arguing under their breath as they moved forward, until Sasuke discerned the genjutsu being used to conceal the area around the Sound camp. He and Naruto killed the first guard without notice, but the second one managed to alert the camp, and after that the argument was abandoned in favor of the fighting.

——

It was twenty-three minutes later when the intense shockwave of the fox demon's chakra was felt all the way back to Konoha.

The two anbu chasing Naruto, Takami and Taguchi, had called for backup when they realized that the most talented remains of the Hidden Sound village were all gathered in the forest before joining the fight; but they were dead by the time Tsunade and a group of anbu and jounin arrived with Kakashi among them.

At least, it was assumed that they were dead--there were very few corpses in the clearing that hadn't been torn apart or otherwise mutilated to an unrecognizable point.

The group was still struggling to get an estimate of the number dead and a hint of where Naruto had gone when Gai arrived with Lee's message for Tsunade.


	9. ripple 9: Naruto quartus

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

To quote Neil Gaiman: "You will learn what it means to take something from a fox."  
——————

**-'**

Lee had never been able to sense chakra properly after the first time he opened the fifth celestial gate for the Extreme Lotus. And the second time he did it, in an actual fight, it rendered him unable to feel almost any chakra beyond his own. Every once in a while he could pick up a hint of Sakura's when she worked some particularly strenuous or complicated jutsu, and he could tell when Naruto was using the fox demon's chakra if the other teenager was in close proximity; and that was all.

But when Sakura shuddered violently and jerked awake, he woke up as well.

"Sakura?" he asked, pushing himself up. She was sitting already, arms wrapped around herself. ". . . Is it—?"

"Naruto," Sakura agreed, before hugging herself tighter. "He's using so **much**—what could have hap. . . ." Her voice trailed off, and she started to frown.

The frown changed to widened eyes, and she twisted around to look at the wall behind the bed. Lee didn't need to ask this time—_he'd_ felt it when Naruto teleported into the living room.

The bedroom door slammed open. Naruto strode in, grabbed Sakura by the arm, and yanked her out of the bed. She snatched the sheet with her free hand, dragging it with her as she stumbled behind the blond into the short hall. "Naruto! What the hell are you—"

Lee was already shoving his feet into his uniform when Sakura's half-indignant, half-frightened rebuke was cut off by a small scream. He jumped over the bed and ran into the hall, grabbing the doorframe so that his momentum would swing him to the left and into the living room.

He didn't know what he'd expected to see, but it definitely wasn't Uchiha Sasuke sprawled unconscious and bleeding on his carpet, with a giant viper twined around his leg.

Sakura had made a half-hearted effort to wrap the sheet around herself before crashing to her knees next to Sasuke, but it was already falling as she forced her hands through a set of seals as fast as possible, gathering chakra before pressing both palms over his torso.

Lee stared for a moment, before looking up at Naruto, who was crouched on his sofa and staring down at Sakura's hands. He swallowed once and yanked the sleeves onto his arms, not bothering to zip the back, before asking: "Naruto-kun, what happened?"

Naruto didn't look up. "We went to fight Orochimaru. Sasuke got hurt. Get help."

Lee looked back to Sasuke, and Sakura's pale face, and nodded. He moved across the room, unlocked and pulled open the front door, and then tore down the walkway before jumping the stairs and _running_ for the Hokage's tower. He didn't even think about his weights, still sitting in the bedroom; partly because even through the glow of Sakura's chakra he had seen, and smelled, the sliced intestines.

And partly because Naruto was sharpening his claws on the sofa cushion, slowly and methodically, as he stared at Sakura and Sasuke.

Lee arrived at the tower faster running than most shinobi would have reached it taking the rooftops.

**-'-**

He had already returned to the apartment with Shizune when Tsunade arrived. The older woman had never seen the inside of Lee's home, so she teleported to her office before rapidly making her way to the building.

Sakura had managed to close up the damage to Sasuke's intestines and clean out the mess, and now was focused on reattaching the muscle fibers to each other. Shizune was working on Sasuke's left arm, where he had been badly bitten by a snake: the flesh along his wrist was nearly torn away, and a few of the more delicate bones had been broken.

Tsunade paused when she saw the viper. It blinked—or winked, she wasn't sure—at her once before resting its head on Sasuke's shin again.

Naruto was still crouched on the sofa, still clawing at the cushions. His skin and clothes were smeared with drying blood, but the bits of gore still sticking to his arms suggested that it was mainly others'.

Sakura had grown paler. Tsunade stepped widely around the snake before resting a hand on her shoulder. Neither of them missed the fact that Naruto growled at the action. "I'll take over."

"I can do it," Sakura replied, and her tone almost hid her weariness.

"Sakura."

She hesitated for a moment, finished connecting the two fibers she'd been focused on, and then stood up and let Tsunade take her place. Sakura pulled the sheet back up from where it had fallen around her waist and absently tucked it beneath her arms as she hovered behind Tsunade and Shizune.

Half a minute passed before she noticed the amount of people in and around the small apartment. Sakura reddened, pulled the sheet up higher, and jogged back to the bedroom.

Naruto shifted on the couch as she left, tilting his head up just enough to keep her in his peripheral vision as he stared at Sasuke.

Tsunade wished that Sasuke had been dumped a few meters further from the sofa. This was not the best situation to work in, since it was a struggle to concentrate when her instincts were demanding she not let her guard drop. And it wasn't just her—Shizune's head was bent over Sasuke's wrist, but Tsunade could see the younger woman's gaze flicking nervously to Naruto every once in a while.

And the damn snake wasn't helping matters. It just lay there, _staring_ at her, like the teenager on the couch.

Tsunade forced herself to memorize this moment, down to the tension and—_it's__ fear, admit it_, she told herself—that she felt. She **had** to keep these memories, for when the inevitable day came, to remind her that no matter what Naruto said or how he acted, this was all he really was: the container of the fox demon.

The room was quiet except for low murmur of chakra and the ripping of the cushion's fabric, so Sakura's footsteps sounded loud even on the carpet as she walked back into the room with her dress hastily tugged on.

The tension was much more obvious for having left it for several moments. Tsunade, directly across from Naruto and right beside the viper, was displaying a level of nervousness she normally would have kept as hidden as her real face; and Lee had subtly placed himself behind the couch, ready to tackle the blond if necessary. Gai was standing beside the door, and there was an anbu—Sakura recognized the mask, but didn't remember his name—behind Tsunade. He had his sword unsheathed, but it was tokenly hidden behind him.

Sakura shifted her gaze back to Lee, stared at him for a moment, and almost smiled. Then she took a deep, quiet breath and placed her hands on her hips.

"**Naruto**!"

His head jerked up at that, and those violent red eyes were focused on her alone.

"Can't you sit like a **regular** person?" Sakura huffed. "You're wrecking Lee's couch!"

Naruto blinked at her. Several times.

Then he looked down at the cushion, and blinked again.

"Uh." Naruto shifted so that he was sitting on the couch, and started trying to shove some of the stuffing back through the rips. "Sorry."

"It's okay," Lee said a moment later. He assessed the room once more, and when Gai nodded, he walked over to Sakura.

He reached back and slipped his hand around hers as he watched Naruto futilely try to push a few more puffs of stuffing into the cushion. She squeezed it tightly.

Naruto gave up on the sofa and looked back at Sasuke. "Is he. . . ?"

"He's not dead," Tsunade replied shortly. "He didn't lose **too** much blood, and Orochimaru did a shitty job of trying to cut his guts out, so he'll be fine eventually."

"It wasn't—"

Naruto cut himself off then. Tsunade waited, but when he didn't continue, she prompted him with a "What?"

"Nothing," he mumbled.

Another stretch of unpleasant silence passed, before Sakura let go of Lee's hand and took a step towards the blond. "Come on, Naruto, you need to wash up so I can check your injuries."

"I'll be fine."

"Yeah, yeah, **move**. He won't wake up any faster just because you're glaring."

Naruto grumbled something that made Tsunade say "Brat!" but he stood up. Sakura followed him into the bathroom across the hall from the bedroom, and shut the door behind them.

"Just . . . try to shower that stuff off, it'll be fastest," she told him.

Naruto nodded and shrugged out of his jacket, dropping it against the wall before turning on the spray.

Some of the blood had soaked through the jacket enough to stain his shirt. Sakura swallowed and kept her face straight.

"Did you break any ribs?" she asked, noticing the fading bruise that reached up to his collarbone.

Naruto stopped scrubbing at his arms long enough to press a hand to the right side of his chest. "They're okay."

"You make my job easy," Sakura said with a half-smile, leaning back on the rim of the tub.

Naruto turned slightly away and went back to scraping flakes of blood and bits of muscle off his arms.

". . . Naruto?"

"Yeah."

His voice was still mostly the hoarser one of the fox, making the tone gruffer than he'd intended. "It wasn't what?" Sakura asked.

Naruto hesitated for a moment, unable to decide what to do with his arms. He finally folded them and stared down at the tiles, still not facing her. "It wasn't Orochimaru."

"So . . . someone else. . . ?"

"Sasuke did it. Himself." His grip on his upper arms tightened. "I . . . I was fighting Kabuto, so I don't really know how they were fighting, and I didn't recognize a lot of the attacks, but I think they were throwing fire and seals at each other or something. Sasuke managed to trap that snake bastard, but he mirrored it or some shit, so they were both stuck. And there were more Soundnins around, but it was just me, and Kabuto wasn't letting me get near them, but I got close enough to—to hear. . . ."

Naruto's voice finally slowed down again, and Sakura sat down on the edge of the tub, hands clenching the rim.

"Orochimaru was talking about how Sasuke could either die there and waste his _whole_ life, or he could let that bastard have him, and either way he was never going to kill Itachi himself, but that he'd do it with Sasuke's own hands if he chose the second option. And then he said something about how Sasuke still had to pay the reasonable price for everything that he'd taught him."

Naruto paused, before saying, "I dunno if Sasuke replied, but a couple seconds later, he **laughed**. And that even got Kabuto to stop. He just—_laughed_. Like, like. . . ." Naruto made a few gestures with his hands, trying to convey to Sakura that strange, vicious, hysterical sound Sasuke had made. Little cuts littered his arms where his claws had dug into the skin.

Naruto's hands stilled in the air, water splashing over them, and then he let them drop. "And then he flipped his grip on that fucking sword and tried to kill himself. I think he was aiming for his heart, or his throat, but that snake grabbed his wrist and shifted the blade enough that it was just his stomach."

Sakura had let go of the tub. Her hands were clenched around each other and pressed against her stomach, as if that could rid of the sour feeling growing there. Part of her thought that Naruto must have seen wrong, **had** to have seen wrong, because this was crazy, it was **Sasuke**, Sasuke who was so damned determined to live that he risked his life and reputation and home to do so. Sasuke would never try to kill himself if there was even a glimmer of a chance left.

Except. . . .

Sakura still remembered the one conversation she'd had with Orochimaru, years ago at the chuunin exam. She remembered that the man had a way of speaking that made the things he said sound like undeniable, unavoidable facts.

When he'd told her "Sasuke-kun will seek me to seek power," that had been it. She'd known it would happen. That long month when Sasuke was away training with Kakashi, the exam itself, the weeks afterward, and those four days between his and Naruto's fight on the hospital roof and the night he left—days that Sakura didn't really remember because she'd had so little sleep from standing at the bridge every night—were all colored with the knowledge that one day Sasuke was going to walk away from them.

Because once Orochimaru said it would happen, it just became so _obvious_.

" . . . I guess if he can't kill Itachi, nothing else matters," Naruto added angrily.

"We already knew that," Sakura said softly.

Naruto's hands clenched into fists. Sakura fought down the urge to pry them open and tell him to stop it.

"Did Sasuke's . . . did that break Orochimaru's seal?" she asked to distract him. "So he could move?"

"I guess so."

"You 'guess'? Geez, Naruto, either he moved or he didn't."

"I don't remember the rest of it."

**That** information cut even deeper than the truth about Sasuke's wounds. Sakura stared.

". . . What?" she managed to say. "But you always . . . before. . . ."

"I know." Naruto's voice was hoarser now, but it didn't sound like the result of the fox demon this time. "Sasuke—the sword—he fell off the branch he'd been on, and then . . . I remember killing Kabuto, and this guy trying to protect Orochimaru . . . and I remember jumping at the snake bastard, but then. . . ."

He trailed off, and clenched his fists tighter.

Sakura shivered once, realizing that she'd been _alone_ with that thing for almost ten minutes and had never known how little of it had been Naruto, and that if anyone found out . . . if Tsunade or Jiraiya or Kakashi found out. . . .

If **Konoha** found out.

". . . Do . . . do you remember if you killed the anbu?"

He shook his head, and Sakura felt sick.

"Naruto. . . ."

"I _know!_" he hissed, and his voice broke at the end. He was shaking.

Sakura pushed the nausea down and made herself stand up. She turned off the shower, bit her lip, and then turned around and hugged Naruto. He stood there and let her, staring over her shoulder at the floor.

"He really wanted to die, Sakura-chan," the other teenager whispered. "He didn't even look to see where I was, if I could help. He just. . . ."

She hugged him more tightly, but all it did was make her more aware that he was still shaking. "It's okay. We're all okay. You're still you."

Naruto shuddered violently at that, and Sakura hugged him even tighter. "_He's_ okay," she murmured. "It's okay. Things will be all right."

"Promise me, Sakura-chan," Naruto demanded, almost childishly. "Promise me he'll be okay?"

"Definitely," she said firmly. "You got him back in plenty of time. I'm sure he'll be awake in a day or two; and then you can scream at him all you want, okay?"

"Yeah," Naruto said, but he was still shaking.

Sakura continued to hold him, wishing she could at least pretend it was doing any good.

The water that had soaked Naruto's clothes was seeping into her own, and the sharp stone of his necklace began to cut into her skin through the damp fabric. Eventually Sakura shifted, trying to move so that it wasn't digging in quite so much. Naruto stirred a little at that, and soon he pulled back. She let him go.

Naruto chuckled uncomfortably. "Uh, sorry about wrecking you guys' anniversary," he said, reaching up to scratch the back of his head. He quickly winced and let it drop again.

"What's wrong?"

"Kabuto brained me pretty good during the fight," Naruto explained. "It's mostly healed."

"Let me see," Sakura replied, motioning for him to turn around.

He did, and after a brief examination, Sakura realized some of the blood staining his hair was actually his own. _Must've been some hit_, she thought, and told him, "This is probably the reason the fox demon managed to take so much control; you were disoriented."

Naruto started to turn toward her. "But that's not—"

"**I** say it is," Sakura interrupted. "Which of us is the medical ninja here, Naruto?"

After a few moments, she focused her attention back on his skull to get away from his eyes. "When Tsunade-sensei asks, tell her that's my guess. It _does_ look like he got you pretty hard."

"Right," Naruto said in a low voice, looking away.

There was another long silence, and then Sakura took a step back. "Well, aside from that, you look like you're okay. There's not much I can do."

Naruto nodded.

**-'**

Sakura came back into the living room when Tsunade called her. Naruto followed a few moments later, gingerly rubbing his hair with a towel.

"Lee's agreed to keep Uchiha here until he wakes up," Tsunade informed her. "Do you need Shizune to stay for tonight?"

"Um . . . but, is that safe?" Sakura asked hesitantly. "He's lost a lot of blood—doesn't he need a transfusion?" She only remembered after the question that there no longer were any Uchiha blood samples being kept at the hospital, and the only acceptable family to donate any—the Hyuugas—were pretty damn unlikely to consent.

Tsunade didn't point out her mistake. "Talk to the snake," was all she said.

The snake was still wrapped around Sasuke's lower leg. When she looked at it, it stared back, unblinking.

"I'll get a saline drip and the equipment brought from the hospital, Sakura-kun," Shizune said. "There's not much else to do."

"You. Get the fuck off him and let them work."

Naruto's voice was harsh. Sakura tensed reflexively and took a step to the side.

The viper remained unimpressed. "It won't be smart to place him among strangers right now, fox," it said, stretching up enough to see Naruto over the arm of the couch. "There's no telling what the change will make him act like when he wakes up."

Naruto glared. "Change, what change? Is this some shit with that curse seal?"

The viper made an amused hissing noise.

"Naruto, it's better not to move him too soon," Tsunade said calmly. "If he doesn't regain consciousness in a day or two, we'll bring him to the hospital."

When Naruto didn't disagree, she turned her attention to the snake. "_You_ need to move enough that we can put him on the bed. You're not doing him any good by forcing him to remain on that floor."

The snake flicked its tongue out once, and that small action managed to look threatening because it was just so damn _big_.

But it only said mildly, "I accede to your medical wisdom, Tsunade-hime," and began to detangle itself from Sasuke.

Sakura saw a muscle twitch in Tsunade's cheek, but the woman's voice was even when she requested Lee help her carry Sasuke into the bedroom.

**-'**

Lee had Sasuke carefully propped up by his shoulders so that Sakura could wrap the wound in his stomach. There was the faint shape of a handprint on the remaining skin of his stomach, where Sakura's hand had gotten too close and the chakra had burned it. Shizune and Gai had gone to the hospital to pick up the supplies, and Naruto and Tsunade were arguing outside the doorway. The viper was curled up on the opposite side of the bed, within a hand's breadth of Sasuke.

"I'm not leaving," Naruto repeated.

"Naruto." Tsunade's voice was flat, tired, stressed, and very annoyed. "You can't stay here."

"Why? I'm not tired, and if that anbu stays here no one will get in. I'm not leaving him."

Tsunade pinched the bridge of her nose. Sakura taped down the edge of the bandages and said the words that the woman had been trying to avoid. "You can't stay here," she told him, looking up. "If too many people get that scared again and try to break in, we can't protect the both of you. You'll be safer at the tower with Tsunade-sensei, and we'll be safer if it's just Sasuke here."

Naruto looked away. She'd hurt him and she knew it, but Naruto wouldn't listen to those words from anyone else.

Some days Sakura really hated who she'd been forced to become.

She smiled for him. "I promise, if he wakes up tonight, I'll send someone to tell you _immediately_. Okay? And tomorrow . . . everyone will be a little calmer tomorrow, and you can come back then. Just give us a chance to get a couple hours' sleep first."

". . . all right," Naruto muttered. "Let's just go."

"Where's Kakashi?" Tsunade called into the living room.

"Outside with the other team, Hokage-sama," the anbu replied.

"Tell him to stay in here," she said, and, "Come on, Naruto."

Lee settled Sasuke on the bed as Tsunade teleported herself and Naruto back to the tower. Despite all the work they'd done on his stomach, the bandages were still staining a faint red at the center of the damage.

When the front door opened, Sakura stood up. The adrenaline that had kept her moving this long was wearing away, and Lee wrapped a supporting arm across her shoulders as they walked out of the bedroom. By the door, Kakashi and the anbu nodded to each other before the anbu left to take up his post outside.

Lee's voice was quiet. "Sakura, are you certain about—?"

She nodded before he could finish. "The snake. . . ." She hesitated, and finally whispered: "It's probably the best guard he can have right now. I don't think it wants to see him dead."

Lee accepted that she was not saying something, probably the same thing that Naruto had not said, and nodded.

Kakashi looked like he'd thrown his uniform on, in the dark, but he still had his sharingan covered and was wearing the mask. Sakura wondered if he actually slept in that mask, and if so, how he hadn't suffocated himself yet. She decided to ask Sasuke when he woke up.

"How is he?" the man asked.

"Unconscious," Sakura replied. "Kakashi-sensei, you can see patterns of chakra with your eye, right?"

When he nodded, she asked, "Will you look at him, please? There's something weird about his."

The man frowned, but followed her into the bedroom.

Kakashi paused for a moment when he finally saw Sasuke, but then he pulled his forehead protector up and focused.

"He looks the same," he told Sakura several moments later. "There's residue from you and Tsunade-sama and Shizune, but there's nothing strange about the flow. What were you sensing?"

Sakura frowned. "It feels . . . different. Not like the curse seal, but—not exactly how it used to. And, the snake said something about him changing. . . ."

Kakashi looked over at the viper, who was now resting its head on Sasuke's right thigh. "What did that mean?"

"You're Kakashi," the snake replied.

"Yes."

"He talked about you once."

Kakashi pursed his lips, but it wasn't visible through the mask. "I'm surprised."

"I didn't say it was flattering."

"You didn't say it was bad, either."

The snake made that amused hiss again, before lifting its head. "He said you were the third most dangerous to him. Above Orochimaru, even—but still below the fox and his older brother. And you can find out what I meant when he wakes up and gives me permission to tell you."

The viper laid its head back down, seemingly ignoring them; but Kakashi doubted it would let him take another step closer to Sasuke. He turned around and left the room, bringing Sakura and Lee with him.

"Hm," he said, before looking over at Sakura. "You need to get some more sleep."

She wasn't swaying on her feet, but only because she was leaning on Lee. "Shizune-san and Gai-san haven't returned with the saline drip yet."

"You don't have to be a medical ninja to set up one of those," Kakashi told her. "And Shizune won't think less of you for taking a nap."

"But Sasuke. . . ."

"I'll stay up," Kakashi told her. "If anything happens, I'll wake you."

Sakura still hesitated, and Lee nudged her toward the couch. Finally she sighed in annoyance, but gratefully curled up on the sofa. Normally she would have felt bad about lying on Lee's furniture in wet clothes, but the couch had seen worse that night.

Despite her weariness, Sakura wasn't able to fall asleep until nearly twelve minutes later—after Gai returned with Shizune and ran through the whole spiel again, with his own student—when Lee sat down and Sakura could feel his hand solidly in her own.  
-

_We suffer because of our bonds_.


	10. ripple 10: Ino

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

I have an explanation for what happened with Sasuke's eyes, but I didn't find a way to work it into the story until much later. But it's not random.

I don't think marriage would be as big a deal as Ino makes it out to be, since neither Lee nor Sakura come from bloodline families and since children in a ninja village seem to mature faster. Ino is just being a brat.

* * *

Sasuke was still unconscious when Naruto returned the next morning.

(He wasn't wearing a new ward, because Tsunade had given up. With the events of the past few weeks, there was no point in pretending she and Jiraiya were successfully hiding him from Akatsuki any longer.)

"You walked?" Sakura asked.

"I live here too," Naruto replied in a low voice, and Sakura agreed with him too much to bring herself to retort. She gave him the news about Sasuke instead.

Naruto nodded, then walked past her and sat down beside the bedroom doorway.

Lee didn't go out that day. Sakura went home long enough to let her parents know she was fine and to change clothes, but otherwise stayed at the apartment.

Mid-morning dragged to late afternoon, and Naruto stayed beside the door. Sakura tried to make him to eat lunch at the table, but eventually quit and brought the food to him. It wasn't until Iruka showed up that he finally moved.

Kakashi and Gai were playing a vehement—on Gai's side—game of cards at the table, while Sakura sewed a patch over the rips in the cushion. Lee was busy scrubbing the carpet with some horrible-smelling mix of chemicals that Gai swore would make the bloodstains disappear. Sakura suspected it wouldn't do anything but ruin the carpet further, but there was no telling Lee that.

It took Iruka the better part of half an hour and the promise of dinner at Ichiraku's to convince Naruto to leave for the evening, but he finally managed it. Naruto left his post bedside the doorway and went to pick up his coat from where it was drying in the windowsill.

Sakura had thrown an eighth of a cup of Gai's chemical stuff into the laundry when she made an attempt to wash Naruto's jacket, since _it_ couldn't get any worse, unless the chemicals completely ate away the fabric. It didn't do that, but it did turn it an interesting pinkish-yellow and puce color, except where the bloodstains had been. Those were now tan.

"Auuuuuugh!" Naruto shook the coat, as if he could recombine the colors that way, while Sakura covered her mouth with her hand and tried very hard not to laugh loudly. Gai looked distraught.

Iruka patted his shoulder sympathetically. "Come on, Naruto-kun, it's not—that bad."

"It's the only one I had!"

"Well . . . maybe you should consider wearing a different color now. Orange isn't very stealthy."

"It's **pink**!" he said woefully.

"Pink isn't very stealthy either."

Iruka shepherded the still-complaining Naruto out the door. Later the card game finished, with Kakashi the winner, and soon Gai left to do three hundred pushups—or five hundred crunches, Sakura hadn't paid attention. That evening, Shizune arrived with more saline drips, and told Sakura that if Sasuke hadn't woken up by this time tomorrow, they would move him to the hospital.

Sakura offered dinner to the anbu outside the door, and noted that it had changed at some point; the mask was different.

That night, Kakashi slept on the couch, and Lee set up his guest futon on the bedroom floor so he and Sakura could sleep there.

She stayed awake long after Lee and Kakashi were asleep, trying to talk to the snake and waiting.

**-'**

When Naruto came over the next morning, he was wearing a pale green jacket that clashed so horribly with his orange pants she could only stare in amazement, Sasuke was still unconscious, Kakashi had left for a two-day mission that required the copying power of the sharingan, and Sakura learned from an accidental slip that someone had broken the windows of Naruto's apartment yesterday.

"That's so stupid," she muttered, leaning against the wall.

He shrugged and grinned. "Yeah. But the way I figure is, since the rent and stuff's being paid out of taxes, if they wanna break it, they're still paying for it."

"That's not good enough."

Naruto scratched his cheek. "Iruka-sensei helped me tape over the windows, and it's not cold yet, so it's not a big deal. This wasn't so bad."

"Don't just say—!"

She cut herself off when Naruto gave her a look. Sakura stared down at the floor for a minute, arms still folded. Naruto toyed with a loose thread on his sandal.

At last she nodded, without speaking, and went to help Lee move the couch over the carpet stain.

Naruto sat by the door again until Hinata and Neji showed up early that afternoon.

Sakura had asked Hinata to come, but she hadn't expected Neji. Lee hadn't either, but he greeted the both of them cheerfully. Naruto finally dragged himself away from the door at the sound of Hinata's hello; and within half an hour the five of them were around the table, drinking the green tea that Hinata had brought and made while Naruto told one of his stories from the time he had spent training with Jiraiya, complete with dramatic hand gestures and voices.

(It was during the fifth month of his training that the after-effects of the fox demon started lasting beyond Naruto's immediate use of the chakra. They still wore off quickly in the beginning, so Jiraiya never took him to Tsunade for an examination. But eventually the scars, claws, and eyes took longer fade, and then longer, and finally in the eighth month a week passed before it became obvious that they weren't going to fade this time. Jiraiya and Naruto then returned to Konoha.

Naruto told only Sakura about the nightmares he'd been having since the second month.

He told no one about the dreams with the man whose features he could never make out, who always apologized for something and told him to never stop enjoying life no matter what.)

This story involved a missingnin thief Jiraiya had been hunting down to help out their expenses, a bordello, cross-dressing, and Naruto's sexy no jutsu. Sakura had heard it once before and been intensely disturbed by the mental images, so she was drinking her tea and actively ignoring Naruto's voice by thinking of the library in the inner rooms of the Hokage's office.

So she didn't notice when Neji's eyes narrowed, or when he started actively using the byakugan; but it was hard to miss Hinata stiffening next to her.

Lee had already seen Neji's action. Naruto caught on and fell silent a few moments later.

In the quiet, Sakura could hear the snake speaking, but it was too soft to be anything other than hissings.

Neji placed a hand on Hinata's shoulder. "Hinata-sama," he said under his breath, "I'm required. . . ."

She nodded. "Um, thank—thank you for the tea, Naruto-kun, Lee-kun, Sakura-chan. I'm sorry, but we have to. . . ."

Sakura smiled and stood up, prompting everyone else to stand as well. "No, thank you for coming over to visit us! It was fun."

She grabbed Naruto's wrist when he made a move towards the hallway and forced him to see Hinata and Neji out the front door. He distractedly promised to tell Hinata the rest of the story when he saw her again—she asked despite the fact she'd been blushing non-stop by the time he got to Jiraiya's kimono being too small—and then Lee offered to walk back to the Hyuuga compound with them. Neji just nodded.

Lee didn't intend to go far from the apartment, at least not until he felt everything was fine, but he said that he would for the same reason that Neji went along with it.

It was the same as the reason he didn't talk about Neji's curse seal, or the fact that Tenten had nearly failed the genjutsu requirements of the Academy, to anyone who didn't already know; and the same reason that Neji and Tenten didn't talk about Lee's mother having never been married. Some things belonged, and stayed, within one's team.

He suspected that whatever had happened to Sasuke, as long as it didn't put Sakura and Naruto in danger, was probably one of those things.

**-'**

By the time Sakura finished shutting the door, Naruto had already pulled his wrist free and was halfway to the bedroom. She caught up before he reached the doorway.

"Sasuke?"

His gaze jerked away from the snake and focused on the two of them. Less than a second passed before Sasuke closed his eyes—and when he opened them, they were just black again.

"You're alive," he informed Naruto. The bland statement failed to cover the relief in his voice.

"Yeah," the blond replied, scratching his cheek. A few moments of silence passed before he added: "No thanks to **you**, asshole."

Sasuke glanced at her. Sakura nodded once—_Yes, he told me; yes, I'll take it to my grave_—and Sasuke turned his attention back to Naruto.

"I told you not to fall behind, dead last."

Naruto bristled. "What, you wanted me to fight the whole damn Sound Village by myself? —I **can**, but not without . . . lend a hand next time, you jerk!"

"You looked like you were doing fine on your own, fox," the viper commented. "In fact, if you hadn't run out of humans to tear apart, Sasuke might have died out there."

"Kyomamushi-sama," Sasuke said abruptly, setting a hand on the snake's head. "I am grateful for your help; but the fight is over, and your presence is not crucial anymore. Please return to your own place and let yourself rest."

Sakura had the feeling that if the snake could smile, it would be. "I enjoy hearing you talk like that. Any time, Sasuke," it replied, before disappearing. His hand fell to the blanket.

Naruto looked like he was still trying to detangle the elevated speech pattern Sasuke had used. Sakura took a step into the room. "You shouldn't be sitting up so soon—your nerve endings and muscles aren't fully reconnected yet."

"Where's Orochimaru?"

She froze. Naruto stiffened.

"He's dead," the blond said flatly.

"You killed him."

"Yeah."

Sasuke laughed bitterly. "Of course you killed him. Who **else** could?"

"Hey—!"

"Where's my sword?" Sasuke interrupted.

Naruto's eyes narrowed further. "What do you want **that** thing for?"

"It was useful," the other teenager replied. "I have no reason to throw it away."

Sasuke emphasized the 'it.' Naruto growled and moved forward, until Sakura grabbed his arm with both hands.

"No!" she said, and he let her pull him back. "Not right now. Just—not this time."

She maneuvered enough to push Naruto into the hallway with those last words, and shut the bedroom door behind him; but not enough to click the lock.

Sakura let out a breath and tucked a stray bit of hair back underneath her forehead protector before turning around. She looked at Sasuke for a few moments, then said a brief, silent 'thank you' that the snake was gone before slapping him.

It was hardly the strongest punch she could have delivered, and Sasuke was trained to handle worse with ease. His head only jerked a fraction to the side, and that was mostly from surprise. But it made the point.

When he shifted to glare at her, Sakura glared back. "Don't be so cruel. He was really scared for you."

When Sasuke didn't reply, she sat down on the side of the bed and unclenched his hands from around the blanket. Then she made a little upward motion. "Lift your arms so I can change the bandages."

**-'**

When she left the room to get a fresh bowl of water, Naruto wasn't in the hallway. The apartment was small, and it took less than a minute to determine that he wasn't anywhere in it. Sakura swore to herself.

When Lee returned a few minutes later, she sent him to look in the nearby area. He came back and said that he hadn't seen Naruto anywhere, but the anbu guard who had been on top of the roof was now gone. Sakura resisted the urge to swear at Sasuke, but just barely.

Sasuke told her he wasn't hungry, but she made him eat half a bowl of broth and drink two glasses of water before leaving him alone.

It was getting late then, almost the time that Shizune said they would take Sasuke to the hospital, and Sakura had just remembered that she hadn't sent word that he was conscious. She was trying to decide if it would be okay to go herself or if she should ask Lee to do it when Naruto kicked open the front door and stomped in. He was carrying a sheathed katana.

Oukei entered behind him, his anbu mask pushed up to the top of his head and a bemused expression on his face. He stopped by the doorway when Sakura waved him back and followed Naruto.

She reached him before he got the bedroom door open again. Sasuke immediately pushed himself into a sitting position when he saw the blond, and Sakura made an annoyed sound as a faint pink begin to stain the bandages again.

"**Here**." Naruto shoved the sword at Sasuke. "We're useful too, so if you pull this leaving shit again I'll break every bone in your body and then Sakura-chan'll heal them crooked!"

Sasuke stared.

"I can't do that, Naruto," Sakura commented, after a long pause. "There's a code I'm supposed to follow."

Naruto turned and gave her his 'c'mon, pity me!' expression. "Sakura-chan! But it's for his own good! Couldn't you just heal a hand crooked or something?"

She folded her arms and rolled her eyes. "_No_, Naruto. Do you want people to think I'm a bad healer?"

Sasuke pulled the sword out slightly. "You put it in the sheath before it was clean?" he said incredulously. "You failed basic weapons maintenance, didn't you?"

"Screw you!" Naruto retorted. "I brought it back, didn't I? You can clean your **own** junk!"

"Thank you."

"I'm not your—huh?"

Sasuke didn't deign to repeat himself.

Naruto shifted on his feet. "Uh. You're welcome, I guess."

Sasuke pulled the sword out the rest of the way. "Do you have any rags I can use, Sakura?"

"Um." She let her arms drop. "Lee used most of them on the carpet, so they've probably still got those weird chemicals on them . . . there might be more, let me look."

Sasuke and Naruto were already bickering by the time she returned with two rags and a bowl of warm water, which was about the best sign there was.

**-'**

Once the sword was clean, and Sasuke had set the sheath aside to wash it out later, Sakura stood up.

"I'm going to go inform Shizune-san that you're awake, so she won't stop by later. Naruto, you're coming with me."

"What? Why!"

"Because you ran off enough today."

". . . I don't get it."

"**Move**."

She glanced back at Sasuke as she herded Naruto out the door. "Please stop sitting up until you've healed more. And if you need anything, I'll be back soon, and Lee's here."

"I'm fine," Sasuke replied.

_Of course you are_, she thought, but didn't say it out loud.

**-'**

Sakura waited to speak until they were about half-way to the hospital and Oukei was following far enough behind that he wouldn't overhear. "Hey, Naruto?"

"Yeah?"

"You . . . you saw his eyes, right? This afternoon?"

"Yeah," he nodded.

"What **was** that? I mean, that was the sharingan, right? They were red. . . ."

"I dunno," Naruto said, scratching the back of his neck. "It looked like it. Kinda."

"'Changing' . . ." Sakura murmured, clasping her hands in front of her. ". . . You said his eyes changed once before, right?"

Naruto nodded again. "But that was just getting another one of those comma things, so he had three like Kakashi-sensei. Not like this."

Sakura let out her breath in a sharp hiss and intertwined her fingers.

". . . What do we do, Sakura-chan? Neji and Hinata must have seen it, so we can't . . . should we tell Kakashi-sensei?"

"We _ought_ to tell Tsunade-sensei," Sakura replied.

Naruto made a face. She didn't say any more.

Sakura and Naruto were both painfully aware that Tsunade didn't like Sasuke. Logically, Sakura knew that the woman had no real reason to; Sasuke had defected from Konoha almost at her arrival, giving her no time to get to know him (_Like that would have helped_, she conceded), and he left for **Orochimaru** of all people, and he beat the hell out of Naruto, her favorite, in the process. His fate in her opinion had pretty much been sealed the same day he left—not even Sakura and Naruto together had been able to keep her from declaring him a missingnin.

They had barely been able to keep him from being formally arrested and standing trial.

Sakura had grabbed Naruto as soon as he came out of the haze that the wards put him in and had gone to plead for Sasuke in person. Tsunade had listened to their request with that one blank expression Sakura was never able to interpret. She then had Kakashi called into her office, explained the situation to him, and asked his opinion, all without showing any emotion.

For some reason, Kakashi had rubbed at his hair, and took a long time to reply. Sakura used the silence to speak up again. She felt like she was fighting a losing battle, and thus saw little point in being polite.

"We already have Anko-san," she mentioned quietly, "and no one suspects anything of her. It's not like he can command eternal loyalty. And—and she turned out fine. She's a little weird—"

Naruto snorted.

"—but she's okay," Sakura finished, ignoring him. "Sasuke isn't hopeless, either. And he's given us all this information on the Hidden Sound village; not even a spy could have gotten all that. He's trying to make up."

Tsunade held up a hand, and Sakura stopped talking. The woman looked over at Kakashi. "Well?"

"I think having him arrested right would be a very bad idea," Kakashi said evenly. "He's chafing already under this house arrest. If you try to put him on trial for something he believes he had every right to do, we'll lose him and the sharingan forever."

"'Every right to do'?"

Kakashi's mask was very useful at times. "His older brother has had a severe influence on Sasuke for the majority of his life. I'm certain that he felt justified in the actions he took."

Tsunade was silent as she considered his words. She tapped her thumb against her desk, and looked at a point somewhere beyond the three of them.

"Fine," she said at last. "I'll make the arrangements, but it won't be easy. Kakashi, you'll likely have to speak on his behalf at the meeting."

Naruto grinned and started to laugh, but Tsunade hadn't finished. "And if he leaves Konoha again, you'll be expected to hunt him down."

"Hey, **hey**, hag, you can't—"

"Tsunade-sensei, that's too—!"

"There is no other person in this village—or, frankly, this world—who can hold out against the sharingan," Tsunade said flatly, interrupting them. "Because of time and politics I couldn't afford to send you last time, but that will no longer be an issue." She paused, and then added, "And as he's your student, he's also your responsibility."

Kakashi bowed briefly. "I understand, Hokage-sama."

"HEY—"

Sakura clamped a hand over Naruto's mouth.

"That's all. I'm going to have a lot of arguments to counter in the next few hours, so unless there's anything else. . . ."

"Thank you very much, Tsunade-sensei," Sakura said, bowing as far as she could without risking Naruto dislodging her hand. "I promise Sasuke isn't a threat to Konoha."

"It's dangerous to give your word so easily," was all the woman replied.

When they got into the hallway and the door to Tsunade's office was shut, Sakura pulled her hand away. Naruto immediately jerked back and glared at the door. "Why's she _being_ like this?"

"She's just doing her job, Naruto," Sakura said as she looked at the reflection of Kakashi in the window. "Sasuke hasn't done much to inspire confidence in himself."

Naruto swore and jerked back to face the front. "Kakashi-sensei! Don't—"

Sakura grabbed his wrist and squeezed hard.

When Naruto looked over at her with a scowl on his face, Sakura redirected her gaze to the windows. It took Naruto a moment, but finally he looked as well.

After a few seconds, the blond grit his teeth loudly, but some of the tension left his arm. Sakura squeezed his wrist again, gently this time, before letting go. She continued following Kakashi down the hall, and Naruto trailed along behind her; and both of them avoided looking at the windows' reflections again.

(In their four years under the man, Naruto and Sakura had never seen so much weariness on Kakashi's face before.)

Naruto grumbled under his breath, and Sakura subtly glanced back to make sure that Oukei hadn't come within hearing range of them.

"Damn sharingan. Damn _Uchiha_," Naruto continued. "Damn Itachi. Somebody should just kill that guy alrea—"

"**Don't**." Sakura's voice was sharp. "Don't even think it. No one can touch Itachi."

"He's just one guy, Sakura-chan," Naruto replied. "If he didn't have those stupid eyes—"

"That's not what I meant," she interrupted again. "I meant you can't touch him, because of Sasuke. You can't take everything from him, Naruto."

Naruto was silent for a full block, and Sakura didn't look over at him.

"That's not . . . I wasn't trying to do that."

"I know you weren't trying to," Sakura said gently. "But you end up doing it anyway."

"So **what**? Are we just supposed to let that dumbass keeping chasing after him!"

Sakura bit her lip. "Sasuke will get stronger, and he'll win the fight and kill that damn man, and maybe then he can start trying to live like a normal person. Or maybe he'll never be strong enough and Itachi will kill him. But it's _his_ fight."

Naruto growled, low and threatening, and grabbed her arm. "You just **talk** about him dying. . . ."

Behind them, she felt Oukei move closer and begin concentrating his chakra. Sakura shook her head vigorously, but this time the anbu ignored her.

"Don't think it's easy for me to say that!" she hissed, still trying not to let Oukei overhear. "I don't want Sasuke to die! But I don't want to see him walk _away_ again, either, and it's what he'll do!" She jerked her head to the left and stared at the deep red eyes glaring at her. "It's what he'll do, if you keep trying to protect him. He doesn't want that. He doesn't appreciate it."

". . . I know," Naruto finally snarled. "I **know** Sasuke hates my guts for always jumping in. But I don't . . . I _can't_ just. . . ."

Sakura placed a hand over the one clamped around her arm. The motion made Naruto realize that his claws had cut into her skin, and he quickly let go. She bit down a wince.

"I'm sorry, Sakura-chan."

"It's okay."

Oukei was still hesitating, ready to move if necessary, so Sakura made a little hand motion behind her back. He finally let his hands fall, no longer poised to attack; but he began walking much closer behind them now. She dropped her voice accordingly, knowing Naruto would still hear it.

"You did the right thing that night."

". . . It wasn't me."

"You still did the right thing, Naruto. Just because he'll be an ungrateful asshole about it doesn't mean you can let him die. But with Itachi. . . ." She trailed off, and finally shook her head. "It's not the same. If you kill Itachi, nothing will ever be okay again."

"So what **am** I supposed to do?"

"I don't _know_," she whispered. "Just because I know what we can't do doesn't mean I know what we should."

**-'**

When Sakura arrived at the hospital and notified Shizune that Sasuke had woken up, she neglected to mention his eyes. Naruto said nothing at all.

She parted with the blond afterward, and headed home long enough to tell her parents that she intended to stay at Lee's until Sasuke either went to a hospital or was healed enough to return to Kakashi's. To her surprise, they said nothing to her—at all—so she packed a spare dress and a few toiletries and left.

Lee was surprised when she told him about her parents' silence as well, but when Sakura shrugged it off, he nodded in acceptance.

Since Kakashi wasn't sleeping on the couch that night, they moved the futon to the living room.

**-'**

Two days later, Tenten showed up and told Lee that Gai wanted the team to meet.

Technically there wasn't a team anymore; Tenten had made it to chuunin level, and Lee was a jounin, and Neji would immediately become a chuunin himself as soon as he could make the judges feel comfortable placing him in charge of others. (Hinata had told them that he would make it at the next exam. Naruto had just laughed until Neji stood up and ordered him into a fight. Naruto lost, but he had still been wearing the ward then, and Neji knew it.) Lee went anyway.

Sakura had returned to the Hokage tower the day after Sasuke woke up. Tsunade had tested her on the latest drug she'd learned and then dismissed her; and Sakura had spent the rest of the day studying scrolls in the library.

Since it was early morning when Lee left, she went back today as well, thinking that the other teenager would be home in time for lunch. Sakura stayed in the library until early afternoon, when Tsunade was preoccupied with a meeting and she was able to leave with several scrolls on the chakra flow of the human body and no questions.

She returned to the apartment to find that Lee had not returned, and Sasuke had made lunch and borrowed a pair of Lee's pants long enough to wash his own clothes. When she yelled at him for moving around while still injured, he told her to quit babying him, he was fine now.

"There was a big hole in your stomach, Sasuke," she replied. "That takes _time_ to heal."

"It was a gash, it didn't go all the way through, and you're talented," he said flatly. "It's a pointless demand for me to stay in bed."

The first three statements were all true, and the fourth one probably was as well, so Sakura had a hard time arguing further. She wound up saying it was pointless for him to stay on his feet out of spite; and Sasuke ignored her and went to the bathroom to clean out the sheath of his katana. Sakura ignored his ignoring her and sat down at the table to study one of the scrolls.

Sasuke eventually finished cleaning, came back to the living room, and sat down on the couch to sharpen the sword with a whetting stone that he'd taken from the pack of weapons that Sakura kept on Lee's bookshelf. They worked in silence.

A couple hours later, it was nearly dinner time, and Lee hadn't returned. Sakura rolled up the second scroll she'd been reading and the separate one full of notes she'd taken, and realized she was going to have to buy food if they wanted to eat tonight. They'd run out of the previous supplies.

She swore under her breath, causing Sasuke to finally look up from where he had managed to draw out sharpening the sword for hours, in-between hanging his clothes to dry. Sakura gathered everything up and hid it all in the bedroom closet, before hunting down her purse. She counted the amount in there, added a few coins from Lee's, and walked to the door.

Sasuke had seen her going back and forth with the scrolls, but she didn't worry about him looking for them. She could count on him not to care that much about her secrets. Some things wouldn't change.

"If Lee comes back before me, tell him I'm shopping," Sakura said as she pulled on her boots. "And tell him I'll be fine."

"You'll be fine?" Sasuke repeated.

"Bye," Sakura replied as she pulled open the door, not explaining.

**-'**

The Asagiri grocery wasn't very busy at that time of day, so they ignored Sakura longer than they could have if she'd gone earlier.

Sakura had known that they would avoid helping her as long as possible, and that it would be faster to go to a different grocery on the other side of the village; but unlike the others, the Asagiri family didn't raise their prices for her alone. Ino had been childhood friends with one of their daughters before entering the Academy, so even when the mess with Naruto _really_ began, they still served her in a reasonably quick manner.

But then Sasuke came back, and things went bad. She'd left her mother to do the shopping then, or had asked Lee to do it if she was eating dinner with him. But once it was clear that Sasuke was just as welcome at the Rock apartment as Naruto, even Lee was dragged into the mess—and then Sakura took over shopping again, because Lee got very loud when arguing about things he thought were unfair.

It hadn't been as bad when it was just Naruto, because in the end people knew that Sakura was the one person who could invariably bring him back to himself. Sasuke wasn't granted that saving grace, since he'd shown a bad habit of inadvertently pushing Naruto into the fox in the first place.

Sakura finished reciting the hundred rules of shinobi behavior to herself, and not for the first time considered walking out of the grocery without paying. Then she set her purchases on the counter, leaned against it, and began reciting the sayings again.

When she reached rule twenty-five, she repeated it an extra time. _A kunoichi must possess a heart that never shows tears_.

Sakura closed her eyes, started tapping her foot, and went on to rule twenty-six.

She sensed another person enter the store a few minutes later, and assumed it was a customer until Ino banged her palm on the counter beside her and called, "Hey, Saori! Are you asleep back there?"

"Ino-san!" Saori answered cheerfully, jogging out of the stocking room. She stopped when she saw that Sakura was still in the building.

Ino tapped her fingers expectantly.

Saori stepped up to the counter and started ringing up Sakura's purchases. "Sorry, Haruno-san," she said, not looking up at the other teenager. "I didn't see you there."

"Mm," Sakura replied, handing over the money.

Ino picked up the second bag before Sakura could. "I don't know **why** you still shop here," she said loudly as they walked out of the store. "The produce quality is too poor to make up for such lousy service."

"Ino-chan!" Sakura whispered fiercely. "Don't be so mean!"

"Pfff." Ino waved off her admonition. "Their family hasn't even _tried_ to enter the Academy in three generations. Who cares about them?" She gave Sakura a wide grin. "So, I do get to make one of the speeches at the wedding reception, right?"

Sakura blinked. "What?"

Ino was now wearing that I-know-something-you-don't-want-me-to-know grin that always made Sakura nervous. "I figured Lee-kun is going to propose pretty soon, since half of Konoha knows you two are having sex."

"WHAT?"

Ino snickered. "Please, Sakura, you were over at his apartment, at night, in a _sheet_. What did you expect people to think?"

"What? But—how—there wasn't . . . oh, **shit**." Sakura covered her eyes with a hand. "**That's** why my parents are mad, I'm _so_ dead. . . ."

"Why? You're fifteen, you're a woman. And he'll be old enough to ask in a couple months, right?"

Sakura shook her head, eyes still covered. "My parents aren't shinobi, Ino-chan. They don't think like us. I'm still a child to them."

Ino paused, then shook her head with a small laugh. "Glad I'm not you!"

"Nrrg." Sakura pushed away the hair that was caught beneath her hand and wrapped her arm around the bag again. "Who **told**?"

That grin. Again. Sakura braced herself. "I saw Tenten earlier, and she told me to tell you that Lee-kun would be back late. Gai-san's meeting turned into a lecture on the pleasures of youth having consequences."

". . . You're kidding."

"Nope!" Ino said gleefully, interlocking her fingers behind her and rolling her shoulders back.

Sakura brought the bag up high enough that it hid her face. "Please stop sounding so **amused**, Ino-pig-chan."

"Hmph. She also said Gai-san gave them a lecture on proper birth control—"

"_Ino_-chan!"

"—and that Neji said something, but she wouldn't tell me what that was. She said you'd figure it out when Lee-kun got back."

Sakura frowned, and let the bag slip back down to waist-level.

When she realized that Ino was staring at her expectantly, and wouldn't drop the subject until she got something like an answer, Sakura shifted the bag to her other arm and tucked a bit of hair behind her ear. "He probably said there was no reason for him to listen to the lecture. And you know Lee—_every_thing Gai-san says is important."

"'No reason'?" Ino repeated, raising a curious eyebrow.

"Well, the byakugan can see through stuff, right? So, he probably already. . . ."

Ino and Sakura stopped to ponder that for a moment.

"_Eww_," they decided.

"Gross! Can you imagine seeing your siblings—or your parents—!"

"Ick! Don't say that!"

"No wonder he's such a freak," Ino declared. "But Hinata shouldn't be so shy if it's true."

"Maybe if . . . her father seems kind of scary. . . ."

Ino shuddered dramatically. Sakura considered the subject dropped.

They continued back to the apartment, with Ino making various disturbed comments for another block. But suddenly she stopped short, grabbed Sakura's arm, and swung around in front of her. "Hey!"

"What?" Sakura replied, startled.

"That wasn't—" Ino leaned forward, cupping a hand over her mouth and whispering in Sakura's ear. "That wasn't your first time, was it?" She pulled back. "I mean, if it **was**, and then someone showed up half-dead in the house, that's **gotta** be a bad sign! It's worse than the pillow pointing north!"

"Ooh . . ." Sakura murmured. "It wasn't, but . . . well, it wasn't a major anniversary, so we ought to be okay. Right?"

"Maybe . . ." Ino conceded as they began to walk again.

A few moments later, she folded her arms and gave Sakura an annoyed, sulking look. "Why didn't you tell me about your first time?"

"Why do _you_ think? Gossiper!"

"That's so mean! And after everything I've done for you—some friend you are, Sakura!"

The words came out teasing, but they made Sakura stop again. The other people on the street were starting to give them odd looks.

"Thank you for everything," she said quietly.

Uncomfortable, Ino tried to shrug off the sudden seriousness. "I didn't really mean—"

"I know you didn't; but I'm still grateful." Sakura let the straps of the bag slip over her wrist, and clasped her elbows with her hands, still staring at the ground. "The last month, since he came back . . . if I didn't have you and Lee, it would have been too hard."

Ino shifted on her feet. "Don't thank me, Sakura. It's only because. . . . If Shikamaru or Chouji hadn't come back. . . ." She shook her head. "I don't think I could stand to talk to you if they hadn't come back. But I didn't lose anyone, so it's not like this is hard."

Sakura bit her lip, and nodded briefly. Ino shifted uncomfortably again, and finally elbowed her arm.

"Hey, you better smile. Lee-kun might change his mind about marrying you if you don't look cute."

Sakura rolled her eyes and looked forward again. "Would you shut up about that already?" she muttered, resuming walking.

"No **way**—it's too much fun!"

Sakura sighed.

Ino strode along beside her, hands clasped behind her back again. Ino walked and stood like that a lot recently—she had developed very nice breasts, and she knew it and showed off quite happily.

It was quiet for half a block, until Ino spoke up again. "Besides, I can understand. He's part of your team." She tossed her head, throwing her ponytail over her shoulder. "And I know how long it took **me** to get over my stupid crush on that jerk—at least you wised up faster and found Lee-kun," she added with a grin.

"I never stopped loving Sasuke," Sakura replied, and Ino gave her a startled look. "It just changed."

". . . Okay . . ." Ino said slowly. Sakura was silent.

**-'**

When they finally reached the apartment, Sakura tried to take the second bag from Ino, but the other teenager held onto it and strolled right into the apartment.

Lee had finally returned. He was standing in front of the couch where Sasuke sat, in the middle of vigorously explaining that kenjutsu could never match taijutsu since the Leaf Spinning Wind attack could deliver damage at twice the breaking point of a steel katana. Sasuke was listening seriously.

Lee halted in the middle of a sentence to return Sakura's greeting of mixed annoyance and happiness with a "Welcome back!"

"Hello, Ino-chan," he added when he saw the other teenager. "It's great to see you."

"Sakura was letting the grocery push her around again," Ino informed him. "I **had** to show up. Besides, we had such an _interesting_ talk."

"Ino-chan . . ." Sakura said threateningly. Lee gave her a puzzled look.

"Really, Lee-kun, you shouldn't have Sakura over at your apartment so much. I can't just let you get away with giving my best friend a bad reputation."

"What?"

Ino grabbed the first sack from Sakura's hand and gave him an innocent look. "Oh, everyone's heard that when Sasuke-kun and Naruto showed up, she was already over here. With no clothes on. That doesn't reflect well on a girl; people like to gossip."

"Ino-pig-chan! Stop talking! **Now**!"

Lee straightened, clenching a fist in front of him. "Who's been saying bad things about Sakura?"

"Word gets around, you know. . . ."

Sakura pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. _If I knew that mind-body switch jutsu I could make her shut up_. . . .

"Sakura! Let's get married!"

She blinked and pulled her hand away. "Huh?"

"Let's get married!" Lee repeated, giving her his best determined look. "Then no one can ever say anything bad again!"

"You're not _old_ enough—"

"Then we can at least tell everyone that we will!"

"You're supposed to properly ask her parents first," Sasuke commented.

Sakura gave him a death glare. Sasuke's expression didn't change.

Lee spun around to stare at him. "You're right!" He turned back and caught Sakura's wrist in his hand, and started jogging toward the door. "I can't believe I forgot!"

Sakura grabbed the doorframe as soon as it was in reach and dug in her heels. Lee, who was always aware of his strength and even more so around Sakura, immediately stopped and loosened his grip further. He turned to face her.

Out of the corner of her eye, Sakura could see Sasuke still sitting, and beside him, Ino had propped her arms on the back of the couch and was giggling madly; and Lee was almost completely out the door.

_This is _so_ not how I expected this to go_.

"Lee." Sakura took a breath and said as calmly as she could while still holding the doorframe, "I will be happy to marry you. As soon as you turn sixteen, we'll go ask my parents and your mother for permission. Now please don't go running through the streets telling everyone."

Lee just gazed at her. Behind them, Ino stopped giggling.

Then he hugged her, before suddenly picking her up and spinning around back into the apartment, barely avoiding the step and the edge of the sofa on the way.

When he set her back down, Sakura had to take a second to regain her footing. Lee pressed his cheek against hers and said "Thank you," so quietly that only she could hear. "I promise I will always be there when you need me."

Sakura hugged him tightly.

Ino gave them a full minute before saying, "Get a room already."

Sakura pulled away enough to reply, "You're **in** our room. And you! Stop laughing!"

Ino glanced at Sasuke from the corner of her eye. Only the corners of his mouth were turned up; but, she supposed, that could be the Uchiha version of laughter.

She pushed away from the couch and held the two grocery bags up high. "To celebrate, I'll make dinner tonight! Sakura'll be a housewife too soon to waste a day off."

"You want to celebrate by poisoning us, Ino-chan?" Sakura asked skeptically.

Ino didn't take well to that comment. (Sakura had no way of knowing, but Ino had made lunch for her own team just the past week. Shikamaru refused to eat it. Asuma had gotten sick from the fish.) Lee and Sasuke were treated to a brief verbal catfight, involving references to flower arranging, until it was interrupted by a knock at the door.

Naruto didn't wait for an answer and let himself in. "Huh? Ino?" he said, noticing the interloper immediately. "What are you doing here?"

"Don't be rude, you—what _are_ you wearing?"

"Naruto-kun! Sakura and are going to get married!"

He blinked at Lee. Then he looked over at Sakura. "Really?"

She nodded with a smile.

Naruto smiled immediately after that as well, and if she didn't look too close it didn't have a sad tint. "That's cool," he told them. "I'm glad. And you better take care of her," he added to Lee.

Lee nodded solemnly.

Then Naruto's smile turned to a wide grin and he pointed at Sasuke. "HA! I told you so!"

"I didn't say I doubted it."

"Yeah, well . . . I still told you first!"

"Well, **duh**," Ino muttered under her breath. "Hey, Lee-kun, where do you keep your pots?"

"Whaaaat? You're cooking? Sakura-chan can cook better than you!"

"Shut up!" Ino snapped, adding a slur on Naruto's cooking abilities. He retorted that he could cook plenty, and Sasuke said that having various ways of preparing ramen still meant he could only cook one thing.

When the other three teenagers were distracted, Sakura hugged Lee again, resting her forehead against his jaw.

"I'll never go anywhere you aren't," she murmured. "No matter what happens."

He hugged her back as tightly as he dared.

**-'**

While Ino was cooking, Naruto was pestering her, and Sasuke was ignoring the lot of them, Sakura asked Lee to show her his arms. He hesitated for a moment, then unwrapped the bandages enough for her to see the raw knuckles.

"I wanted to train a little extra today," Lee told her, and Sakura wouldn't have needed Ino's comment to realize what had happened. Whenever Lee said that with a smile, it meant he had messed up on one of his crazy goals and had gotten caught in a spiral of ever-increasing hard work until he either reached a goal or wound up passing out for a while. When he said it without a smile, it meant Neji had been an ass about something. And given what Gai had been lecturing on, she could guess what.

"We're lucky," Sakura said quietly, rewrapping the bandages, "to come from families where who our fathers were isn't so important to who we are."

"I know," Lee replied. "We're very lucky."

**-'**

Lee was not surprised when he found the collection of scrolls hidden in his closet later that evening. Sakura had told him before anyone else what she was going to try to do.


	11. ripple 11: the mangekyou sharingan

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

I'm playing the "school" card—chapters are going to be more sporadic until finals are over.

* * *

**-'**

The morning Kakashi returned from his mission, he went home and slept until late evening.

When he woke up, the headache had faded enough that he could ignore it. He washed off the visible grime at the sink and made his way to the hospital. At the hospital, he was told that Sasuke had never been admitted, so he went to Lee's apartment and found the teenager losing badly to Naruto at poker.

(Ino had gone home after dinner, and she'd pushed Lee and Sakura into walking back with her, or they could have warned Sasuke never to gamble against Naruto.)

Kakashi settled on the couch and watched with amusement as Sasuke proceeded to lose another three hands.

When he dealt the fourth time, Sasuke barely glanced at his cards before setting them on the table. "I fold."

"What? At least pretend to have a good hand!"

"I'm not going to go broke playing someone with fox luck," Sasuke replied, standing. "Are you ready to leave, Kakashi-sensei?"

He blinked. "You're coming back with me?"

"Has the Hokage decided I can live on my own yet?" the teenager replied.

After a long pause, Naruto warned him: "Sakura-chan'll be mad if you leave without telling her."

"She'll be here soon." He made a vague motion towards Lee's clothes. "And I have to change."

As soon as Sasuke had his back to the table, Naruto reached over and peeked at his cards. He snorted, and Sasuke closed the bedroom door emphatically.

Naruto dropped the cards on top of his own and began shuffling them back into the deck. "Hey, Kakashi-sensei?"

"Yeah?"

"Is there another kind of sharingan?"

Kakashi paused. "What do you mean?"

"Like, a kind that looks weird. Where those black things are like a warped triangle."

Kakashi's eye narrowed. "Naruto, where's your bad-luck charm?"

"Huh? It's here, same as—"

When Naruto glanced down and started to tug his necklace out from under his shirt, Kakashi pulled a kunai from his vest and threw it at the teenager. It landed in his collarbone, only a few centimeters from the artery.

Naruto fell backwards with a loud yell.

"**Shit**!" He jerked the weapon out with a grimace. "What the hell was that for?"

Kakashi had already lifted his forehead protector and was studying Naruto carefully, ignoring the headache that made itself painfully known again. In the hallway, Sasuke had wrenched open the door and was halfway into the room, shirt still in hand.

Naruto's chakra looked the same as it always did—and most importantly, it was still there. Half-smothered by the fox demon's, but that was the way it had been for over a year. He was still there.

"You would have blocked that if you were the fox demon," Kakashi said, and Naruto looked at him like he was crazy.

"_What?_" he demanded, a hand clamped over his bleeding shoulder. "Why the hell would you—I'm not that damn fox! **Damn**, Kakashi-sensei!"

"Because you're not dead. I had to make sure," the man replied.

Naruto was starting to look more pissed than confused. Kakashi glanced at Sasuke from the corner of his eye.

The other teenager's eyes were wide as he stared at Naruto. Kakashi realized with surprise that Sasuke _just hadn't considered_ the possibility that, far-fetched as it was, Naruto really had died and the demon was still walking around in his skin.

It was a dangerous enough slip that Kakashi should have been angry. Instead, he was mostly relieved; it meant Sasuke wasn't intentionally risking his teammates' lives just to hide a secret.

It was nice to get these little signs that the last seven weeks weren't wasted time.

Naruto noticed that Kakashi was looking elsewhere, and shifted his focus accordingly. He frowned again when he saw Sasuke's expression.

Sasuke jerked his gaze away as soon as Naruto looked at him, and stared at Kakashi instead. That was no improvement, so he glanced at Naruto again before taking a step back.

Sasuke finally managed to force his features into a scowl. He turned sharply, kicked the bathroom door open, stormed in, and kicked it shut harder behind him.

Naruto was gaping. "What. . . ?"

"It's called the mangekyou sharingan," Kakashi said, answering his earlier question. "What Sasuke told me—as far as he knew . . . it could only be attained by killing the person who is closest to you."

Naruto looked at him and blinked.

_You're alive_.

He'd heard the relief, been glad for it, thought that the surprise was just Sasuke underestimating him again like he always did.

And then, years ago, he'd heard the regret hidden so far beneath all that coldness, but there hadn't been time to think about it. And later when there **was** time, he assumed that Sasuke had just been angry that he'd found no one better in Konoha he could call a friend besides the idiot Uzumaki boy.

_It was not meaningless . . . to me, you have become my closest friend_. . . .

Naruto stared wide-eyed at the bathroom door as things sunk in.

A minute later he shoved away from the table, and went to the kitchen to wash the blood off his hand. He ran the water much longer than necessary—the wound in his shoulder had already healed by the time he shut it off.

Sasuke stayed in the bathroom until Sakura and Lee returned.

Several seconds after Sakura's cheerful greeting and Naruto's hesitant reply, Sasuke walked out and announced that he was leaving with Kakashi. He had his arms folded over his stomach, but the long rip in his shirt was still visible, as was the stain that not even the best soap a ninja village had to offer could fully remove.

It was obvious that something had gone very wrong, so Sakura wavered only a moment before sighing dramatically. "Why do I _bother?_" She shook her head. "Okay. If you can move around this much without grimacing, you're probably healed. Don't punish yourself with any strenuous training for at least two more days, and you'll be fine."

Sasuke just blinked at her, in that slow, 'are you done yet?' way of his. Sakura propped a fist on her hip. "I mean it! If you rip all that work open again just because you ignored me, I'll deck you!"

"She will," Naruto called from the kitchen. "Ever since she started training under Tsunade, she's gotten violent."

"Shut up, you."

Sasuke nodded perfunctorily and walked out the front door. Kakashi pushed himself lazily off the couch, said his goodbyes, and caught up with the teenager before he reached the street.

**-'-**

Naruto walked into the living room once the door was shut, and Sakura gave him a curious look.

"It's okay," Naruto told her, tapping his temple beside his eye. "They . . . you were right."

"What about your shoulder?"

"I'll tell you later," he said. "I . . . I'll see you tomorrow?"

". . . Okay. Do you want me to walk—?"

He shook his head before she could finish. "I'm good. See ya, Sakura-chan, Lee!"

After she saw him out, Sakura sat down heavily on the couch and pulled her feet up beneath her. "I swear, with those two it's like every time I turn my back, _some_thing happens. . . ."

Lee rubbed the nape of her neck comfortingly. Sakura hummed under her breath and tilted her head forward.

After a few minutes, he pulled away and leaned his arms on the back of the couch. "I guess I should walk you home; it's almost your curfew."

"No way!" Sakura replied. "I'll tell my parents that Sasuke left tomorrow morning."

"Sakura! It's not right to lie."

"I'm not lying. I'm using a situation to my advantage."

Her line of reasoning failed to convince Lee, but he didn't argue too long for her to go home, either.

**-'**

"Just go there," Jiraiya said, lounging on the couch in Tsunade's office. "Chew him out, remember the good times, say goodbye and be _done_ with it."

Tsunade slapped one of the papers she'd finished skimming onto the stack. "I don't have time to waste on that kind of crap."

"It'll be healthy," he cajoled.

"**Jiraiya**."

His lack of a masochistic side convinced him to stop talking.

Jiraiya tapped his fingers on the back of the couch for several minutes, while Tsunade scrawled furiously on another paper and ignored his existence. She slammed that paper onto the stack as well, and the wood of the desk creaked. He held back a snicker.

There was a knock at the door, and a woman—Jiraiya had seen her working in the tower before, but she lacked enough cleavage for him to remember her name—opened it and peeked in. "Haruno-san is here, Hokage-sama. She asked to see you."

"Huh, she's early. Tell her to come in," Tsunade added, before waving a dismissing hand at Jiraiya. "You, leave."

He stood up. "Really, Tsunade, think about it. He was—"

"Get _out_, Jiraiya."

He shrugged and left, passing by Sakura on his way down the hall.

Once she entered the room, the first thing that she did was bow perfunctorily. Tsunade raised an eyebrow.

"What's happened?" the woman asked.

Sakura straightened. "I need to make a formal request that Rock Lee and I not be placed on the same out-going teams any longer."

The second eyebrow went up.

"He's asked me to marry him," Sakura explained with a smile. "So, to keep with the rules and everything. . . . He'll probably put his request in later."

"Already? You're both still so youn—ha!" Tsunade cut herself off with a laugh. "What am I saying?" She shook her head, and pushed away from the desk before standing up. "Trust me, Sakura, when you get older you'll find yourself thinking of you guys as kids even when you know better. It's like a bad habit."

She patted Sakura's shoulder and gave her a smile. "That's good," Tsunade said. "I'm glad for you."

Sakura grinned. "Thank you!"

Tsunade let her hand drop. "Lee—he goes on a mission tomorrow, right?"

Sakura nodded, and Tsunade waved her off. "I'll have someone handle both your requests. Go spend today with him—_if_ you'll work twice as hard tomorrow to make up for it."

Sakura almost glanced at the library beyond Tsunade's desk, but stopped herself and shook it off with an imperceptible motion. "I will! Thank you, Tsunade-sensei!" She bowed again, quickly, and turned to leave.

"Oh. Before, I need you to do one thing. Find Naruto and Uchiha and tell them to come here. I need to speak to them about that night."

When Sakura turned around, Tsunade added, "I have a feeling what their answers are going to be, but it needs to go on paper."

"Yes." Sakura nodded. "I'll find them immediately."

**-'-**

Naruto wasn't in his apartment, so Sakura decided to get Sasuke first and then go look for him. But no one answered at Kakashi's apartment, so first she had to track down the man, which took her back to the section of town that surrounded the Hokage tower. Kakashi informed her that Naruto had arrived at the apartment early in the morning and dragged Sasuke off; they were probably somewhere beyond the village walls, beating the shit out of each other and pretending it was training.

"**Again**?" Sakura demanded.

"They had something to work out," Kakashi said vaguely. Sakura thought back to last night.

_Boys_, she decided, before thanking Kakashi for the help and setting off to look for them.

**-'**

The slugs weren't much use if speed was necessary. Sakura focused instead on Sasuke's chakra and, once she found it, headed in that direction.

(The fox demon had developed an antipathy towards her in the last two years. Sakura avoided touching Naruto's chakra when she could.)

She was between two trees when there was a loud crash in the bushes in front of her. Sakura yelped and leapt reflexively onto a high branch.

Below, Naruto jumped backwards out of the bushes, the sleeve of his coat on fire. He slid along the dirt, stopped his momentum by slamming the sole of a sandal against a tree trunk, and noticed her.

"Huh?" he said, blinking. "Sakura-chan? What're you doing here?"

"Your sleeve."

Naruto whacked the fire out with a handful of dirt, as Sasuke emerged from the other side of the bushes. Sakura watched him without turning her head.

"Are you all right, Naruto?" she called.

He snorted. "Ha! A lousy punch like that couldn't hurt me!"

One of Sasuke's hands clenched into a fist—but by the time Naruto finished rubbing the dirt off his sleeve and looked up, it was uncurled and his face had settled into a bored expression. Sakura looked away and jumped to the ground.

"Tsunade-sensei sent me to find you guys."

"What? _Now_ what's she want?" Naruto demanded.

Sakura shrugged. "She didn't say exactly, but I think she wants to talk to you about the fight with the Sound."

"She took her time," Sasuke commented.

Sakura studied him with a frown as the three of them began to walk back to Konoha. A bruise was already beginning to show in the juncture between his jawline and throat, and he was walking with his arms crossed in front of his stomach. His right arm was scraped up from a mix of claws and bark.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Fine."

Sakura rolled her eyes and looked over at Naruto, trying to spot any major bruises or cuts before they disappeared. "What about you?"

"You don't need to worry about him," Sasuke said. "He's not a fox, he's a cockroach. He won't fucking die no matter what."

Naruto broke a small branch off a nearby tree and chucked it at him. "Asshole! You're always such a fucking asshole!"

Sasuke caught it. "You're an idiot who chases after what he shouldn't."

"Liar," Naruto replied. "You came back."

"It was never _my_ intention to return here," Sasuke said coldly. "**I** don't go where I'm not wanted."

"**Damn** it!" Naruto half-yelled, ignoring the insult. "What's it gonna take to make you—"

"You are not Konoha," Sasuke snapped. "Sakura is not Konoha. Kakashi-sensei is not _Konoha_. Don't talk to me as though I'm an idiot like you."

Naruto didn't reply to that.

". . . It's not just us," Sakura tried, hoping she wasn't treading on the unknown subject between them. "There's Lee . . . there's other people. With time—"

"With time they'll tolerate me because they want the sharingan."

She wished that Sasuke's voice had been angry, or cold, or arrogant, or anything but that detached tone he had used when describing the Sound village to Tsunade and the clan heads.

After half a minute of strained silence, Sasuke continued. "That's why I haven't been put on trial yet, isn't it? Because Kakashi-sensei said it would be too dangerous at the moment."

"Pretty much," Sakura answered quietly. He snorted derisively.

"He said that you'd leave permanently," she added. "And that you felt justified in what you did."

"I never promised to stay here," he said. "There was nothing I could tell Orochimaru about Konoha that he didn't already know. I never killed anyone wearing the Leaf. I'm not going to waste my life in jail because they think I'm indebted."

"Do you really _believe_ that bullshit?" Naruto asked.

Sasuke gave him a cold look and said nothing, and Naruto bristled. He started talking before Sakura could stop him.

"You! You ran off in the middle of a war, for the _other side_, to learn stuff you could've gotten here or elsewhere and to—" he noticed Sakura's look "to—get molested by snakes! You should go on trial for stupidity, moron!"

The look on Sasuke's face was entertaining. "Mol—**_what_**? What the hell, Naruto!"

"That snake of yours was damn near attached to your leg," Naruto replied, with a grimace. "Nothing normal acts like that!"

"It _was_ pretty creepy," Sakura said, backing up Naruto's change of subject while doing her best not to laugh.

"They're **all** like that," Sasuke said in annoyance, before realizing how it sounded. Sakura bit her lip with a snicker.

Naruto just nodded. "Bet that's what happens when you run off to learn from some freaky-tongued pervert."

"You don't have room to talk! Whose teacher writes Icha Icha Paradise?" Sasuke threw the branch back at Naruto.

He caught it and tossed it to the side. "At least the toads don't grope _me!_"

"Of course not. I'm sure even frogs have **some** taste."

**-'-**

Sakura abandoned the two of them at the tower, having become convinced that she was the only one who had a sane relationship with her summoning animal. Naruto and Sasuke sat outside Tsunade's office for a few minutes, as she foisted a third stack of paperwork off on one of her poor flunkeys before calling them in.

By that point, Naruto's bruises and scars from the fight were almost gone, while Sasuke's were starting to show vividly. It didn't help his mood.

Sasuke sat on the couch, Naruto sprawled on it, and Tsunade asked the first teenager whether he'd been alone when he left Konoha the night he and Naruto fought Orochimaru.

"Naw," Naruto said before Sasuke had the chance to reply. "I was with him the whole time."

"Really," Tsunade drawled.

"Yep!"

"Kakashi said you must have used teleport to leave—" she glanced at Sasuke, who nodded curtly "—so why would you do that just to meet up inside the village? Why not walk out the door?"

"C'mon, Tsunade, that wouldn't be stealthy. We met by the walls."

"What street? Maybe we can find a witness, that'll make this easier."

"I wasn't paying attention!" Naruto replied. "It was a street, pretty far from the gate. The one with the buildings." He glanced over at Sasuke. "You know what I mean, right?"

"The one with the windows in the buildings," Sasuke said dryly.

She ignored the comment. "Did you arrange to meet beforehand?"

"No," Sasuke said before Naruto could answer.

Tsunade raised an eyebrow. "How did you happen to go over the walls together, then?"

"I noticed him moving," Naruto said, with a slight change in tone. "I guessed what he was probably doing, and I got there before he left."

"Hm." There was a brief silence, before she addressed Sasuke: "Assuming you can speak for yourself, is this true?"

Sasuke paused for a moment. "He says it is."

Naruto kicked him in the ankle.

Tsunade's eyes narrowed, and she folded her hands in front of her mouth before staring at them for several seconds. Naruto continued to grin at her.

Finally, Tsunade told him quietly: "You and she are getting very bad about this."

Naruto gave her a quizzical look that she didn't buy for a second. Tsunade interlaced her fingers and rested her hands on the desk. "All right, that's all I needed to know. Naruto, show up here at six tonight."

He frowned. "Whaaa? What for?"

"I'm getting you new clothes," she said. "You're a damn sight hazard in that jacket. You're both free to go," she added, waving a hand at them.

_You're kidding_, Sasuke thought—but Naruto stood up and started to leave with a cheerful goodbye, so he didn't question it further.

**-'**

By the time they were out the door, Naruto was chanting "Shit shit shit" under his breath.

"What _is_ it?" Sasuke finally demanded.

"I've gotta find Sakura-chan," Naruto said distractedly. He stopped in the middle of the path, tilted his head, and sniffed the air. A few seconds later, not bothering with a goodbye, he turned and took off across the roofs. The anbu darted past Sasuke with an annoyed noise, moving quickly to try and catch up with him.

Sasuke watched them disappear between the buildings, and he was more disturbed than he wanted to admit at the way the sun had emphasized Naruto's long scars when he'd twisted his head like that.

He shook it off a moment later—_it was just smell, _all_ shinobi know to use that_—and began walking to Kakashi's apartment.

**-'-**

When Naruto warned Sakura that Tsunade knew they were lying—about what, he wasn't sure, but safety said to assume everything—she decided there was no longer time to waste.

But there wasn't a way for her to access the Hokage's library that day. Sakura spent the rest of the afternoon sparring with Lee, and the evening planning a way to talk to Hinata alone.


	12. ripple 12: Anko

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

Events in this chapter don't all occur in a linear order. Also, I'm not very comfortable with writing fight scenes yet, so the fight at the end is broken up to just the important parts.

This is the longest damn chapter I will ever write.  
——————

**-'**

Sakura found a chance to talk to Hinata roughly a week later, when she learned that Hiashi and several other upper-ranked Hyuuga shinobi were on a mission in the Hidden Mist.

(The Mist village had allied itself with the Sound two years ago, and there was still some fighting going on over there—but since Orochimaru had been declared dead, it was now a case of the Leaf assassinating the strongest or most powerful members of the Mist in the shadows while negotiating peace in public.

A lot of things could be said about Tsunade, but she didn't take chances where the lives of Konoha were involved.)

Sakura had gone to the Hyuuga complex and asked Hinata to sell her some herbs. Hinata had given them over and waved off payment, since the Hyuuga garden typically furnished a portion of the medical supplies for the village, and then Sakura had asked for help in carrying them back.

Hinata had noticed that as soon as they were out of view of the walls, Sakura began leading her toward Lee's apartment rather than to the Hokage's tower, where she'd implied they were going. When she asked what had happened, Sakura had shook her head imperceptibly, murmured "Naruto," and continued walking. That was enough to keep Hinata following her.

Twenty minutes later, Hinata was sitting on Lee's couch, carefully reading the notes and scrolls that Sakura had given her. Sakura was arranging the herbs in packets and setting them on one of the shelves, studiously not looking at her.

"Sakura-chan," Hinata said trepidly, "this is . . . how dangerous is this?"

Sakura paused from where she was tucking oregano into a packet. "Very dangerous," she replied. "There's a chance we could all die, if the fox demon fights back hard enough."

Hinata set the notes back on the table and touched the scroll that contained an extensive drawing of the human chakra system.

"You've seen Naruto lately, right?" Sakura asked. "I can't see the chakra, but what it feels like . . . you've seen it?"

Hinata nodded.

Sakura set the packet of oregano leaves aside, saving it in case she had to make a poultice for snake venom later. "It's . . . if no one does anything, pretty soon it's going to become impossible. At least now it's just dangerous."

Hinata looked at her.

Sakura shifted to face the table and picked up a sheet of paper with a sketch of Naruto's seal. "I'm not going to mess with this," she said. "That would be insane. But--I know someone who is talented with seals. I have to talk to that person first and get their advice; but if they say they can do a secondary seal, then if you'll help me with the byakugan, I can do my part." She smiled. "And if we only do this with people who are precious to Naruto, I think he'll be able to keep the fox demon from fighting us too much."

"But . . . even if we manage . . . you'll have to use so much. . . ."

"I can do my part," Sakura repeated. "If you'll make sure I don't miss anything. We can't just leave this alone anymore, Hinata-chan."

Hinata pressed a thumb to her lip, staring at the chakra scroll and the drawing of the seal for several long, quiet minutes.

But at last she nodded.

——

Because Konoha was surrounded by forest, there wasn't much arable land—not enough to feed an entire village. In times of relative peace it could import necessary foodstuffs from other villages and countries, but in times of war, Konoha had developed the practice of using the bodies of enemies to fertilize extra land.

The Leaf was no longer technically at war with the Sound, but still, there had been a lot of dead ninjas left in the forest; and Naruto had made it too difficult to tell individuals apart to make even the most rudimentary of funerals spiritually practical.

Jiraiya had commented to Tsunade—on a public street, just a bit too loudly—that any seeds planted with Orochimaru would probably come up poisoned. That afternoon, a few of the clan heads put in a request that as much of the man's body as could be recognized be taken from the others and cremated. Tsunade signed the form and told them to take care of it without bothering her further.

Orochimaru's ashes disappeared from the crematorium that night. A small plot of upturned earth appeared in the public cemetery by the next morning, just off one of the secondary paths, barely noticeable to anyone not trained to constantly look for suspicious discrepancies.

When a legendary sannin of your village does something inexplicable, you look the other way. People who had reason to visit the cemetery walked over the spot if they remembered to, and it no one talked about it.

Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura had passed by one day, on their return from another (though more toned down) three-way sparring match, and saw a woman who was visiting. They watched her deviate from her path just enough to walk over the spot, before looping back around and heading toward her original destination.

Sasuke snorted. "What a waste of time."

"He tried to destroy the village," Sakura replied.

"Then they should find where he's really buried," Sasuke said. "Not get caught in an obvious diversion."

Sakura blinked at him, glanced at the cemetery, and then looked over at Naruto.

He scratched the back of his head. "Jiraiya said an enemy who's strong should be respected once they're dead."

Another derisive noise from Sasuke. Sakura didn't comment.

——

Near the shrine that had been set up to honor the third Hokage, there was a piece of land that had been dug up and so carefully replanted that it was impossible to see where the dirt had been disturbed.

Anko and Sasuke each found the place separately within a week, and then ignored its existence.

——

The day after Sasuke and Naruto spoke to Tsunade, Kakashi's food supplies had run low enough that the remaining individual items couldn't be combined to make a non-lethal meal. He and Sasuke ate lunch out with the intention of grocery shopping afterward.

Kakashi noticed her first, since Sasuke was sitting with his back to the entrance.

(It had taken a month before Sasuke would sit or stand anywhere in public without his back against a solid surface. And it wasn't until the teenager identified the majority of Orochimaru's current vessel's face that he finally started taking the less strategic positions.)

When Anko walked past the restaurant, Kakashi had no reason to distinguish her from the rest of the people on the street—except that two seconds after she passed by, she returned, came inside, and strode up to their table.

Anko ignored Kakashi's languid, curious look. "You," she said to Sasuke's back. "Come with me."

Sasuke finished his piece of chicken tempura without a change in facial expression. Then he set down enough money to pay for his half of the bill and, avoiding Kakashi's eyes, left with Anko.

The restaurant was noticeably quieter once they were gone.

Kakashi rummaged in his vest, pulled out his copy of Icha Icha Paradise volume two, and returned to his meal as if he had no problems with letting two volatile former students of an S-class criminal talk without supervision.

For a few minutes, the quiet remained. The noise level in the kitchen increased first, as someone was yelled at to wash the dishes faster before they ran out, and it spread outward until the building was filled with the normal amount of chatter. Kakashi ate at a slightly slower pace than usual, lingering over his last few bites until he was certain that the people were at least relatively comfortable with what they'd seen.

Then he combined his money with Sasuke's, paid, and did the grocery shopping by himself.

—

Sasuke didn't return until past nightfall, limping, bleeding, and grinning in a way that unsettled Kakashi.

The expression was gone when Sasuke looked up from removing his sandals, though. The teenager cleaned and wrapped his wounds in the bathroom, and then immediately fell asleep, skipping dinner. And avoiding speaking to him, which Kakashi didn't fail to notice.

He also noticed, when he spotted Anko in the center of the village the next morning, that she was just as badly bruised as Sasuke and was favoring her right arm.

Sasuke and Anko unofficially began their brief and intense—outsiders would have argued irrationally deadly—training together from that day.

Kakashi could have objected. If he mentioned how things looked to other people, there was even a chance of Sasuke listening to him. He didn't for two reasons: Anko was seemingly on equal footing against Sasuke, not above him, and neither Naruto nor Sakura appeared to have a problem with the arrangement. Sasuke was spending almost more time with them than with him since the night after his fight with Orochimaru, and Kakashi felt they had a better chance of noticing anything detrimental in his actions.

It didn't mean that they would tell _him_ about it; but they would notice and try to take care of it, and then he would be able to spot the signs from Naruto if not from Sasuke or Sakura.

He didn't like the new secrecy between the three, but none of them were his students anymore, so there was only so far he could push.

—

A week and a half after her conversation with Hinata, Sakura still hadn't spoken to Sasuke. She could have told herself it was because she didn't have enough information on Naruto's chakra or about the seal itself to be certain of the details of her plan, and that was true; but it wasn't the real reason.

(Two days after Orochimaru's death had been confirmed, Sakura noticed that Sasuke was doing some of the small things that he had done when he left Konoha the last time. They were only sporadic, and occurred even more rarely once he started training with Anko—but she saw that he consistently avoided Kakashi's eyes, and she remembered that that had been the first sign.

Sakura put the conversation off because she was planning. She knew Sasuke was used to people trying to manipulate him, so she was going to have to be obvious, and she was going to have to be good.)

She had returned from a two-day mission the previous night, and walked over to the tower from her parent's house the next morning. There she learned that Tsunade had expected her to sleep in and had set up a meeting that ran into the time the woman usually set aside to teach. Sakura said she would wait and settled in the library.

Tsunade came in while she was reading through a scroll she'd taken from the locked case containing the fourth Hokage's work. Sakura tilted the parchment up a fraction when the woman sat down on the couch, and looked up from her place on the floor. "Hello, Tsunade-sensei!"

Tsunade nodded at the greeting, but there was an odd, distant look in her eyes. Sakura paused for a moment, then began thinking of a way to roll the paper up without the inside being made visible. She'd already pulled down several more neutral scrolls, and intended to take this one out buried in the middle of them.

"You know, Sarutobi-sensei was still our teacher when he was made third Hokage," Tsunade said.

Sakura blinked and looked over at her again. Tsunade was leaning back in the couch, arms draped over the top, and staring at the room with a slight smile.

"He brought us up to see the office the week after the initiation ceremonies," she continued. "Jiraiya was babbling about the view and hot springs when we noticed we'd lost Orochimaru somewhere."

Sakura listened.

"We found him here in the library, crying . . . he'd realized that with training and missions and life, it would take him at least half a decade to learn everything in here. And this place was smaller then, ha!" She smirked. "We didn't let him live that down for _years_."

After a few seconds of silence, the smirk faded. Tsunade pursed her lips. "It took longer, since he hadn't expected Sarutobi-sensei to pressure him into teaching a genin team. But I guess he finally managed it, because one day he left, and when Jiraiya came back from chasing him he nearly had his arm bitten off by one of those damn snakes."

Sakura took a breath, changed her mind, and started rolling up the scroll. "I thought he only trained Anko-san . . ?" she said instead.

"No," Tsunade corrected, "Anko's the only one of the three that survived his preliminary tests."

When Sakura looked up at her in surprise, Tsunade added: "He wouldn't have gotten away with that if Sarutobi-sensei hadn't been Hokage. He managed to talk Orochimaru's charge down to negligence, and Anko kept insisting that everything had been an accident and Orochimaru had tried to get to the other two boys as quickly as possible. Hell, she defended him more than he did himself." Tsunade lifted a hand to her neck, then paused and let it drop again.

It was a habit of hers that Sakura had noted a few times before—she guessed that Tsunade had worn her necklace for decades before giving it to Naruto and still hadn't fully adjusted to its absence.

"He didn't even serve the sentence in the end," Tsunade continued a little more quietly, staring past Sakura again. "Anko was in the top of her class, so she couldn't be left to sit for a year until the next graduation . . . but moving her to another team would have thrown off the ratio. And she refused to learn from anyone but Orochimaru. So finally they decided to push his trial back until she'd learned more and there was a space open, and then time just passed by and nothing ever happened. . . . I don't know what he promised her, but it worked."

"Promised?"

"That was his way," Tsunade said flatly. "He found a person who had something he wanted, figured out what they desired most, and then promised to either give it to them or help them get it."

Sakura placed the rolled and tied scroll on the ground, and then picked up another one and checked its cords. "I thought . . . you said you didn't know how he managed to get people to follow him."

Tsunade raised an eyebrow. "When was that?"

"Those Soundnin spies who were captured—when the one who. . . ." Sakura trailed off before touching her mouth. "That one."

"Ah," Tsunade said, recalling the Soundnin who had used a tiny hidden blade to cut out her tongue and had tried to sever her right hand before the blood loss left her unconscious, while Tsunade had been preoccupied with trying to force information out of the second spy. "That time. . . ." She was silent for a moment, and then shrugged. "I was trying to make a point to you."

_I knew **that**_, Sakura thought. For almost three years, Tsunade and Jiraiya had been trying to make a point to her and Naruto.

But what they didn't seem to see themselves was that things weren't the same. Sasuke had returned after three years, not thirty, and he and Naruto had come back together, and Sasuke hadn't killed Kakashi, and she and Naruto had never left Konoha, and Lee was alive, and Sakura had never had a reason to be afraid of blood.

Things weren't the same; and Sakura and Naruto and Sasuke were all individually coming to the opinion that if Jiraiya and Tsunade wanted to make up for the mistakes of the past, they should have done it in their own time and leave team seven alone.

Sakura set the scroll she'd been holding on top of the fourth Hokage's. "I understand that," she replied. "And . . . and I understand what you're trying to prevent. But, Tsunade-sensei—we're different people." She looked up and gave the woman a smile. "I think we can turn out okay."

Tsunade scrutinized her for half a minute, before replying, "Good luck," and sounding like she meant it.

Sakura nodded. Then she pulled the pile of scrolls closer to herself, shifting them with the movement so that the fourth Hokage's was hidden at the bottom, and asked, "Can I take these home with me? I'll return them tomorrow or the next day."

"Sure," Tsunade said, "as long as you bring the others back as well."

Sakura didn't freeze at the implication. She just paused for a moment, before nodding, and didn't look at the woman's expression.

—

Sakura went to Lee's apartment afterward, though she knew that he wouldn't be home yet. She had to move the notes and papers immediately . . . but the problem was that none of them had enough privacy but Lee. Naruto had constant guards on his house and if _he_ were found with the scrolls there would be an uproar, and Hinata lived in a house where there was no such thing as privacy, and Sasuke was living with Kakashi, and she had her parents.

_This is not going to work_, Sakura decided. _What gave it away? Where was I careless?_

She was unlocking the door when she noticed the drops of blood beside the frame. Sakura frowned at them, then turned and leaned over the railing, glancing along the street.

There was no one there, so she jumped onto the roof for a better vantage point.

In an alley on the opposite side of the building, someone was walking away, cradling their left arm. Sakura slid down the roof to conserve a little chakra, then jumped off before she hit the gutters. She used a neighboring wall as a spring and hit the ground halfway into the alley.

In front of her, Sasuke had turned around. The first thing Sakura noticed was that the cloth wrapped over his arm was very red. And very sodden, though he had it pulled against his stomach and cradled in a way to keep the dripping to a minimum.

Sakura pursed her lips, but she avoided yelling at or chiding Sasuke. At least, she did until he was in the apartment and she'd pulled away the cloth to find that his arm had been torn open to the bone. **Then** she yelled, before forcing him to take three painkillers and lie down on the couch.

"I think Anko-san is trying to kill you," Sakura mentioned, adjusting the towels under his arm so that no blood would stain the table.

"Yeah," Sasuke agreed, surprising her.

"She's mad that he taught _me_ to summon the snakes and not her," he added with proud condescension.

Sakura didn't reply to that, and began using chakra to reconnect the deep muscle fibers to each other and to his ulna.

"And she's mad that Orochimaru's dead," he added, startling Sakura enough that she had to pull the chakra back. "And she's mad that she didn't get to kill him, and she's mad that I didn't kill him, and she's really fucking angry that I let an outsider do it."

Sakura began to worry she had messed up the painkillers' dosage somehow. "Okay," she said evenly, and went back to working on the muscles.

"He had no right . . ." Sasuke muttered under his breath. "What did **he** ever lose to him?"

Sakura blew a strand of hair away from her forehead. "If I didn't know you, Sasuke, I'd swear you're blind by choice."

He frowned at her, but didn't ask.

When enough of the deep muscles were reconnected, Sakura stopped using chakra. She rinsed out the rag and water bowl, and then fetched a needle, thread, and a match.

She measured out the length of the thread and sterilized the needle before making the first stitch. When it had been pulled through until the knot caught on his skin, Sakura asked, "Could you feel that?"

"No," Sasuke replied.

"Okay," she said. She began the second stitch before adding: "Did you know that Akatsuki is still after Naruto?"

Sasuke stiffened. Sakura tsked at him. "Don't do that, you'll mess these up."

She pulled the thread through again and went on to the third stitch. "That's the real reason Tsunade-sensei keeps him under anbu guard. We knew that they wanted him, but they've been waiting until this year to attack. Jiraiya-san's been spending most of his time collecting information."

She wiped away some of the blood still trickling from his arm with the cloth. "They were waiting for a while as we fought the Sound, since we were just weakening ourselves, but now there's no reason for them to hold back. And I think they've been spying at the Sand, too, but that's information that Tsunade-sensei's keeping away from me."

Sasuke's free hand was clenched into a partial fist. "Why are you telling me this?" he demanded in a low voice.

Sakura picked the needle up again and wondered if Sasuke would ever understand how much the next words cost her.

"He'll come to you, Sasuke," she said calmly, starting the fourth stitch. "I don't know if there's anyone else who trained under Orochimaru with a reason to help you besides Anko-san, but I do know that Kakashi-sensei is the only other person with the sharingan. If you stay, they can train you in those areas, and you'll be fighting him on your own ground when he comes."

Sasuke had tensed again. Sakura slapped his fingers. "_Quit_ it. Do you want a worse scar?" she asked as she began another stitch.

Sasuke made a noise in the back of his throat, shifting his head and looking away from her at the ceiling.

The room was silent then, but when Sakura reached the tenth stitch she explained quietly, "You know I watched you all the time back then. You've been doing some of the same. . . . I tried to understand. I really did. But all I keep thinking is that you could be happy here, with us, if you really wanted to be."

She looked up at him. "You can get your reputation back—you're strong, eventually they'll **have** to respect you, even if they don't like you. In a few more years . . . even if things stay the way they are, the three of us. . . ."

Sasuke continued to stare at the ceiling. "If someone killed Lee—he didn't die on a mission, they just murdered him because they could—what would you do?"

"I'd kill that person."

"What if you couldn't? What if you lost the fight because you were too weak and they got away?"

"Then I'd get stronger. And I'd go looking for them. And after three or four years, I'd quit, because Lee wouldn't be happy if I squandered my life like that." Sakura paused, and then asked, "Do you really think this is what your family would want? For you to ruin your life to avenge them?"

Sasuke was quiet for almost half a minute.

"Yes," he said.

He had hesitated before answering, and that's what proved to her that he had thought about it and genuinely believed it was true.

Sakura's shoulders dropped slightly, and she gave him a sad, resigned look. _I wish I'd known you when we were children_, she thought. _Was it really always like this, and Itachi just made it worse?_

She picked up the rag and started cleaning his arm again. "It's your fight," Sakura conceded. "I told Naruto that, too. It doesn't mean he won't interfere when it happens, but he'll do it knowing you'll hate him and not caring if it means you're alive to do it. Just. . . . Just don't think you're the only one who hates Itachi."

Sasuke snorted. Sakura rubbed his arm a little harder than necessary. "**He's** the reason we lost you. Indirectly, but it's still **his** fault. Maybe Naruto and I don't hate him the same way you do, but we'll be glad to see him dead. The last two years hurt."

"I make it clear I didn't want anything to do with the Leaf," Sasuke replied, closing his eyes. "If you two chose to hang on to something useless, that's your weakness."

"It's more than choice," Sakura said, picking up the needle once more. "I don't think I'd choose this feeling."

Sasuke didn't reply, and she finished the last four stitches in silence.

When it was done, Sakura wiped his arm once more and stood up. "I'd like it if you stayed," she said, "but if you have to leave, give me a warning so I can drug Naruto. I don't want to see him hurt like that again. And I'd really appreciate it if you waited until you've done me a favor."

"What," Sasuke said flatly, not opening his eyes.

"I've found a way to return Naruto to normal," Sakura said, picking up the bowl and rag. "But I need you to handle the seals." She looked at Sasuke, who had shoved himself into a half-sitting position and was staring at her with wide eyes. "I'll show you the plans, after you get a couple hours of rest."

"_How_—?"

"I'll show you later," she repeated. "Get some rest—and stop putting pressure on that arm! Geez!"

—

She kept her word, and when Sasuke woke up an hour and forty-three minutes later, Sakura set a bowl of curry rice on the table and showed him the various scrolls and sketches. Sasuke ignored the food and began shifting through the papers, using only his right hand since Sakura had fixed the left one into a sling while he slept.

"This is dangerous," was the first thing he said when finished.

"I have eyes," Sakura replied with annoyance.

"The procedure could kill you."

"I know."

"The fox demon might kill both of us, and him too."

"I don't think so," Sakura said. "If it's you, and me, and Hinata-chan, I believe Naruto will do everything to stop it from hurting us."

"Her too?" Sasuke asked.

Sakura nodded. "I need her to use the byakugan to watch while I separate the two chakras, to make sure I don't accidentally miss a place. I'm going to be exhausted by the end, and leaving even one strand loose will let it start to take Naruto over quicker again."

Sasuke's lips thinned slightly.

Sakura pulled a sheet of paper with a rough sketch of a person on it out from beneath the scroll he'd been reading. "This is the drawing Hinata-chan did for me." She pointed to the note written in neat lines beside the torso. "Here's the bad part. Most of him—" she waved a hand over the paper "—the fox demon's chakra is just growing on top of his own. With really precise chakra use, I can separate it from his, and that will . . . I think that will force it down."

"You think?" Sasuke repeated.

"I'm trying to find more information," Sakura replied. "Because if it doesn't, this is going to be twice as hard. But there's only so much I can take out of the Hokage's library at a time."

"What's the problem here?" he asked, pointing at the stomach.

"Here . . . the fox demon's chakra isn't growing on top of Naruto's, it's bled into it." Sakura rested her chin on her hand. "It's like your curse seal—I don't think they can be separated there, not without hurting him badly. That's what I need you for. Can you put a seal around that area, to prevent the fox demon's chakra from leeching out again? Or at least to slow it down?"

Sasuke picked up the paper. Hinata had drawn thicker, darker lines in the places where there were two strands of chakra—they ran from Naruto's knees almost to his neck and down his forearms. It was all the way to his fingers in his right arm.

"Do you think it's safe to tamper with the Fourth's work?" he asked seriously.

"This isn't tampering, you'd be working in the area around it—but it can be done. Orochimaru did it."

Sasuke looked up.

"In the chuunin exam, when he hit Naruto in the stomach," Sakura explained. "Naruto told me that man put a seal over the original one, and Jiraiya-san took it off later. That's why he sucked at using chakra for the last half of the exam. So it _can_ be done, at least by them . . . and I figured. . . ."

He nodded. "Most of them I learned from . . . get me something that will tell me more about what the fourth Hokage did, and I'll see what will work without counter-reacting."

Sakura leaned over and pulled her bag closer. She rummaged through it for a few seconds before pulling out the small scroll. "This is a description of the Eight Divination Sealing Style—the outer layer of the seal. I've looked everywhere I could, but this is all I can find. The rest of what he did . . . I can make guesses, but I don't know."

Sasuke stared at the scroll in her hand. "That. . . ."

"I'm the Hokage's student. I have access to the library."

"This isn't part of the library." He looked up at her. "If anyone found out. . . . You knew I was—and you still took it?"

"Irrational hope." Sakura smiled. "If you spend too much time around Naruto, it wears off."

Sasuke stared at her in silence for several long seconds, and finally took the scroll from her hand.

—

When Lee returned half an hour later, Sasuke was too engrossed in the scroll to bother with a verbal reply to his greeting. Sakura called out from the kitchen, and Lee joined her there.

"He's going to stay?" Lee asked her, very quietly.

Sakura nodded. "It's about Naruto," she replied in the same low tone, with a small shrug that conveyed the near-inevitability of the thing.

Lee nodded, and grinned. "That's good."

"Yeah," she agreed.

—

After Sasuke was gone, and before she left herself, Sakura rearranged the herbs on the shelf so that the packet of oregano was no longer separated and ready to be easily moved.

——

It annoyed Kakashi now that he had ignored Sakura in favor of Sasuke and Naruto when he had first started training them. It had seemed logical back then—one of the jobs of a genin team's teacher was to determine the ones that would rise above, and Sakura had been a very late bloomer—but it meant that he hadn't noticed her skill at concealing things until Tsunade told him to pay attention to any discrepancies she showed about Naruto.

Sakura was accidentally responsible for him discovering what else Sasuke was doing when he disappeared all day, every day, during those four weeks.

She had come to his apartment one morning, asking if Sasuke could spare a day to train with her and Naruto; and when Kakashi told her that he had already left to meet Anko, there had been just the faintest flicker of confusion in her expression before she huffed in annoyance and left.

He went to the area of the village around the tower, asked a few casual questions about the upcoming jounin announcements, and found out what Sakura had already known: Anko had left yesterday on a three-day mission.

Kakashi studied Sasuke when the teenager returned that night, and noted that he was pale and moving slowly, the same as the previous day. It was the same for the next day as well, but the one after that—when Anko had returned—Sasuke came back with a few signs of a physical fight.

The pale-or-bruised pattern continued, and at the beginning of the fourth week Kakashi mentioned it over dinner. "You shouldn't overwork your sharingan and your body at the same time."

Sasuke paused briefly, chopsticks in mouth, before finishing his bite of squash and resting them on the rim of his bowl. "I've been practicing the mangekyou," he replied. "I can use it to see through others' illusions, and I've figured out how its illusion works."

"We can test it tomorrow," Kakashi replied, still reading.

That might have been the beginning of a smile on Sasuke's face, but he took another bite of squash and started chewing before it was obvious.

—

Kakashi wondered if Sasuke had any idea how nerve-wracking it was to willingly stand still and wait for the teenager's eyes to change from black to red to the mangekyou sharingan.

If Sasuke was just reading Kakashi's body language, then he wouldn't. But if he remembered the side effects from years before, then he could probably guess.

Sasuke opened his eyes, Kakashi closed his normal one, and then the colors of the world inverted themselves.

This was much different from last time; instead of a perfectly detailed room from a traditional house and a double dozen Itachi clones with katanas, there was one of Sasuke and an indistinct mass around them.

"It's not good enough," Sasuke said, folding his arms and glaring at what was probably a wall. "Everything is malleable, but shaping it is hard. I did a better job when just practicing by myself, but it's useless if I can't effectively force it on someone else." He pressed a hand against the wall, leaving a print in the material.

"Hm," Kakashi said. He did the same, but the wall remained firm. "It's more real for me," he said, and Sasuke looked over. "Cruder than the Tsukiyomi, but effective."

"Yes," Sasuke asked, looking away again. "This is the Susano. It's a lower level illusion."

Kakashi frowned beneath his mask, and wondered just how much Itachi had told Sasuke about the mangekyou.

The world returned to its normal colors soon after. Sasuke surprised Kakashi by thanking him for the help, and the man assumed that Sasuke still remembered.

By the time they returned to the apartment, Sasuke was moving slower than he had the other times he'd come back. He fell asleep before lunch, slept until evening, took double the recommended dose of Kakashi's headache pills, and fell asleep again in a few hours. Kakashi took note.

He also noted the small illusion Sasuke had used to hide the fact that his eyes had remained in the sharingan for an hour after using the mangekyou.

——

The only reason Kakashi put that much trust in Sasuke was because of events several days previous.

Sakura was returning from the administration quarter of the village, with a new assignment for the day after tomorrow and another scroll of the fourth Hokage's hidden in her bag, when she met Sasuke. He was officially out to buy dinner for when Kakashi returned from a meeting since they were low on food again, and secretly testing how many restrictions on his freedom were still standing by going out alone. Sakura made a comment that informed Sasuke what she was carrying, and he decided there was enough time to stop at Lee's and look over it before heading back to the apartment.

If he had stopped at a different store rather than the first one on route to Lee's, or if he had just waited until a time when he wasn't with Sakura, nothing would have gone wrong. Mihara didn't personally hate him—just her and Naruto.

"I don't get what's so great about it," Sasuke told her. "I read it, and it was sub-par. Jiraiya's sense of humor is terrible."

"You _read_ it?" Sakura repeated, flabbergasted.

"A few weeks ago. Kakashi-sensei left it out, and there was nothing better to do," Sasuke said as he placed two packages of yakisoba noodles on the counter. Sakura smothered a giggle.

The teenager behind the counter pulled the packages off the counter and shoved the money back at him. "We don't serve traitors or freaks here," he snapped. "Go away."

Sasuke was startled and gave him a cold, assessing look to hide it.

Sakura leaned on the top of the case next to the counter and smiled. "I don't think a family that's turned out nothing but genin for five generations should be talking about 'freaks,' Mihara."

Mihara sneered at her. "I don't think someone whose family didn't even **enter** the Academy for two generations should be so insulting, Haruno. Especially not when the only reason _you_ went in is because you were following Ino-san."

Sakura shoved away from the counter. "You—"

Sasuke nudged her foot with his and pushed the money back over the counter. "Ring up my purchase and we'll leave."

Mihara shoved it back at him, harder, and one of the coins rolled off the counter and onto the outside sidewalk nearby. "We don't want your business, **traitor**."

"I thought you could use all the customers you could get," Sakura commented, hands on hips, "since you had to skip meals just to pay your yearly fees."

Sasuke decided it would be wisest to leave and picked up the coins that were still on the counter.

"Listen, you self-righteous bitch—"

There was a loud bang on the metal awning, as someone used it sloppily for a springboard. That wouldn't have attracted much notice, except that half a moment later Naruto hit the ground in a crouch and shifted around to glare inside the building. Mihara froze.

"What the hell did you say to Sakura-chan?" he growled.

Most people would have stood up before speaking. Naruto was still crouching.

Sasuke heard Sakura curse under her breath, and closed his eyes. Then he opened them enough to see, but lowered enough that the sharingan wasn't obvious.

"It's nothing, Naruto," Sakura said, taking a step towards him. Sasuke nudged her foot again, this time pushing her out of his line of movement. She shifted accordingly.

"Nothing?" Naruto repeated, barely glancing at her before looking back to Mihara. "Then why's he so scared?"

"Naruto," Sakura said more firmly. "It's not a big deal, okay? It was just a little argument."

"I told you not to talk to her anymore," Naruto said, ignoring her and focusing on the teenager who had taken several steps back. He shifted onto the balls of his feet.

"I didn't do anything to her!"

_There's enough room_, Sasuke decided. He took a step to the left to get further clearance, and said boredly, "Sakura can fight people herself if she wants to, idiot. She didn't bother because fighting weaker people makes you look weak." He paused, and when Naruto looked over at him, smirked. "But in that case, _you_ don't have to worry."

Mihara moved further back. Naruto surged onto his feet. "**Hey**! Dammit, take that ba—!"

Sasuke moved forward, aiming for the place Naruto's shoulder was going to be.

He grabbed hold and flipped himself over the blond, tucking in his legs to avoid hitting the top of the store's entrance and yanking Naruto's forehead protector off with his free hand. He winced when a few of the stitches in his arm ripped.

"Ow!" Naruto held the side of his head where Sasuke had inadvertently pulled out some of his hair. Then he started and turned around. "HEY!"

Sasuke had turned as well after landing, and dangled the forehead protector from one finger with another smirk. "Pathetic, dead last."

"Sasuke!" Naruto started to grab at the material, but Sasuke leapt onto the awning and took off across the roofs.

"Bastard! Get back—**Sasuke**!" Naruto tore after him.

The street was relatively quiet for a moment after they were gone, as a lot of people had gravitated towards buildings and weapons when Naruto arrived.

Sakura closed her eyes for a few seconds and let out her breath.

Then she turned around, pulled out her purse, and said, "Get me three more of those, and ring them up."

Mihara started. "Hey!" he sneered, though his voice was still shaky, "don't just think—"

"Matsuo!" a man further back in the store yelled. "Just do it."

". . . Yes, sir," he mumbled, setting the yakisoba back on the counter and moving to get the rest.

When he rang up the total, Sakura put the one coin of Sasuke's from the sidewalk back on the counter and added her own.

"You're a hundred years ahead of yourself if you thought you could replace him," she told Mihara with a cold smile. Then she took the grocery sack and left.

—

Sakura could feel Sasuke and Naruto getting closer when she was halfway up the stairs of Lee's apartment building. It was impossible to miss the fox demon's chakra even if Naruto was only using a tiny bit of it, and Sasuke's chakra had the cold, slick feel that it got only when he was using his curse seal.

She was unlocking the door when Sasuke slid down the roof and hit the hallway. Sakura noticed that the curse seal was only slightly outside the secondary one.

_He's gotten better control_, she realized, right before Naruto skidded down the roof.

Sasuke ducked, and Naruto landed on the railing backwards. He grabbed it with his hands and managed to stabilize himself into a perch.

"Give it **back**! I'll break your fucking hand if you don't!"

"That's getting old, dumbass," Sasuke replied, straightening.

Sakura turned around. "Naruto."

He recognized her tone.

Naruto was already jumping back when Sakura's fist connected with his jaw. Luckily, Lee's apartment building was only two stories tall.

_He wasn't kidding about her being stronger_, Sasuke thought, right after, _What the hell kind of punch was **that**?_

"IDIOT!" Sakura yelled, leaning over the railing. "You can't **pull** that kind of crap in **public**! Threatening people won't fix anything!"

"Neither does picking fights with them," Sasuke said, though from a safer distance.

Sakura clenched her jaw. ". . . You owe me three ryo," she replied, holding the sack out.

Sasuke took it, giving her an expectant look. Sakura ignored him and returned to unlocking the door, with much more violence this time.

Below, Naruto had gotten onto his feet and was staggering toward the stairs. "Sakura-chaaaaaaaan!"

"Don't whine to me!" she yelled back, shoving the door open.

Sasuke opted to stay outside until Naruto reached him.

"It's all the hag's fault," the blond muttered, rubbing his jaw. "Sakura-chan didn't used to be so **mean**," he called into the doorway.

"Shut up!" came the reply from the apartment. "It's your fault for showing up before we could leave! Stop moving so fast—you're gonna give the anbu stress heart attacks!"

Naruto snorted, but let her get away with the half-hearted retort.

"How did you get there that fast?" Sasuke asked. "We were barely talking for a minute."

". . . Sakura-chan smelled angry." Naruto kicked the doorframe. "I wasn't that far away; I figured out where she was and figured it was that bastard Mihara."

It was the part of the answer concerning smell that Sasuke had wanted to know. He nodded curtly. "Who the hell is that guy?"

"No one," Naruto replied. "Now give me my forehead protector back or I'll throw you off the balcony!"

Sasuke pulled it out of his pocket and shoved it at Naruto's chest. Naruto wrenched it from his hand and began tying it back on.

"Don't do that again! That's fighting dirty!"

"Don't let it get taken," Sasuke replied, walking inside.

"Asshole," Naruto replied, and Sasuke could picture the gesture the blond was making at his back.

—

Either he had misinterpreted Sakura's comment, or she had yet to inform Naruto about her plans, because she made no attempt to show Sasuke the scroll. Instead, she snipped away the stitches that hadn't ripped before healing his wound to just a scab. Then she informed Sasuke that she and Naruto were going to spar tomorrow, and he was coming with them.

". . . Fine," Sasuke agreed, because Anko would be busy that day, and because Sakura's expression was not to be argued with, and because Naruto was trying to subtly communicate with her via hand signals when he thought Sasuke couldn't see him.

She smiled. "We're going to meet by that huge tree to the north—the one with the scars from lightning? At ten."

"The one eight kilometers out?"

"Yeah," she said, and Sasuke nodded. While his head was dipped slightly, Sakura gave Naruto a look, and he gave up and decided to trust her judgment.

Sakura and Naruto decided to stay at the apartment until it was dark and they could attract less attention going home. Sasuke left a few minutes after Lee returned.

There were now two anbu members outside the apartment, he noticed—one was lounging on the roof and one was half-hidden by an awning across the street. Neither of them said anything when Sasuke left alone. He, for his part, didn't smile to himself. Outwardly.

—

Sasuke arrived at Kakashi's apartment an hour before the man returned from his meeting, and a few hours before dinner, but he put off his question until then anyway.

A lot of their conversations occurred during meals. The food gave Sasuke a prop equal to Kakashi's perpetual volumes of the Icha Icha series.

"Who's Mihara to Naruto and Sakura?"

Kakashi looked up. "Is this about this afternoon?"

Sasuke kept his expression blank. "What else would it be about?"

"Hm." Kakashi let his noodles drop back into his bowl. "For a while, Naruto was still allowed to go on missions with Sakura. Matsuo was placed in team seven after he graduated, to even it out."

Sasuke just looked at him, waiting for the rest, and Kakashi realized he was going to have to clarify. "Sakura and Naruto didn't take well to it. They felt like he was trying to replace you."

Sasuke gave him a disbelieving look. "That's **it**? That's what all—that's _stupid_. What, did they think he rigged the assigning process?"

Kakashi shrugged a shoulder. "Sakura and Naruto never handled being told to forget about you very well. They might have been friends if he'd been on any other team."

"The way they acted. . . ."

Kakashi swallowed another bite of noodles before replying. "It wasn't like that immediately. At first they just ignored him outside of training. But then Sakura took a month off to go through some specialized study with Tsunade-sama, and after she came back things disintegrated. By the end, she was always sniping at him and Matsuo wasn't watching either of their backs on missions."

". . . Why would _Sakura_ act like that?" Sasuke asked.

"I don't know," Kakashi said. "Never did figure that one out."

There was a brief silence, and Sasuke bit off some of his noodles. "Is that why she isn't a chuunin yet, the lack of teamwork? Naruto made sense, but not her."

"Yes," Kakashi replied. "When Naruto stopped pulling his punches during training, I disbanded the team and had Matsuo moved to another group."

Sasuke had paused. "Disbanded?" he repeated.

"I won't teach people who abuse their teammates," Kakashi said, looking back down at his book. "Physically or mentally."

The chopsticks made a small click when Sasuke tightened his grip. He went back to eating in silence.

When he saw that the teenager was almost finished, Kakashi said off-handly, "You did a good job of getting Naruto out of that crowd."

"Orochimaru went on a lot of trips," Sasuke replied. "He would leave Kabuto in charge of everything, but since that guy didn't have a curse seal, the people who did wouldn't always listen to him. It was my responsibility to keep them in line." He scraped the last of his noodles together. "Naruto was easy in comparison; his reactions are too predictable."

"Ah," Kakashi said, carefully preventing the sound from revealing either his surprise at Sasuke willingly talking about the Sound village for the first time, or his mild approval at the analyzing, or the realization—which Kakashi had not yet determined an emotion for—that Sasuke had apparently had to leave Konoha entirely to gain any semblance of maturity.

But something leaked through, or Sasuke just interpreted correctly, because the teenager didn't even finish chewing his last bite before standing and taking his dishes to the sink.

"There was nothing impressive about it," Sasuke said as he began to rinse out his bowl. "I was Orochimaru's vessel. Disrespecting me was like disrespecting him."

"Ah," Kakashi said again, in a modified tone, and watched as Sasuke's shoulders tensed and then forcefully relaxed.

——

Sasuke had just finished dropping the breakfast dishes into the sink when Sakura and Naruto knocked on the door. At eight in the morning.

Sasuke gave them a look, but Sakura talked too fast and too cheerfully for him to get a question in before Naruto had shoved him out the door. Sasuke assumed that the plan had changed for some reason, and—after pushing Naruto away—went along.

They were only a few streets from Kakashi's apartment when Sakura said "Bye!" in an extremely bright voice and teleported somewhere too far to sense her chakra. Sasuke didn't have time to wonder _Now__ what?_ because Naruto was already tearing off across the roofs.

By the time the anbu member trailing them managed to swear and reach for his radio, Sasuke was gone as well.

—

When he appeared at the base of the tree, Sakura called out from the branches.

"What—" he started to demand, but then he sensed Naruto coming—_he's getting faster_, Sasuke noted, _this is insane_—and less than two minutes later, Naruto was there. Sakura jumped down, still grinning.

Sasuke folded his arms and waited.

Sakura propped her hands on her hips, tilted her head, and said with the same excessive enthusiasm: "We're going to fight each other. For real." She pointed at Naruto. "_You_, stop pretending, we can trust him and you'll notice first when the anbu are about to find us, and _you_—" the finger was now at Sasuke "—you **must** have learned **something** at the Sound, so you better use it, or _I_—" and she reached into her pack and pulled out a pair of gloves "—am going to kick both your asses."

Sasuke raised an eyebrow. Sakura smiled. A smirk slipped onto Naruto's face as well.

"You've been hanging around Naruto too long," he decided. "His boasting's worn off."

Sakura tilted her head in the opposite direction and began pulling on the gloves. The smile was still there, but it had changed while she was looking at him. "We'll see if it's boasting."

—

Once she'd gotten the gloves on, Naruto—who'd been down this path before—immediately got the hell out of range. Sasuke imitated him. In retaliation, Sakura spread a basic genjutsu over the nearby area.

_Okay, Naruto went left, but Sasuke went_—

_Behind!_

"Heh."

Sakura spun around, aiming a kick at his side. Sasuke caught it midway and threw her backwards.

His eyes were that strange form of the sharingan again, Sakura noted, as she flipped and landed. She focused her chakra to her soles of her feet and grabbed a handful of dirt.

The chakra let Sasuke see where she was going to be even before she pushed herself back off the ground, and he moved accordingly. As he kicked her feet out from under her, he moved to block what he expected to be a punch, and Sakura threw the dirt in his eyes.

Sasuke immediately shoved himself backwards, and the blow Sakura had aimed at his shoulder blade glanced off. She took advantage and darted away.

She heard Sasuke laugh, and glanced back to see him rubbing his eyes with a grin. Then Naruto's clones attacked the both of them.  
-

Sasuke hadn't cancelled the illusion—she would have felt that, the way she'd felt Naruto do it—he'd seen _through_ it. She hadn't expected that . . . but okay. Fine. Naruto had precise enough chakra control to avoid low level illusions, too.

She decided it was necessary to use something stronger.

Sakura had taken down the two clones after her, but Naruto had stopped using chakra a moment ago and she couldn't pinpoint his location. Sasuke had disappeared from view, but Sakura could feel him using a lot of chakra to the south-west.

. . . And then the south-east . . . and then. . . .

_All **right**_, Sakura thought a moment later, when the barrier went up. _I didn't have to ask!_

Naruto had locked on Sasuke's location and was heading there, so she followed suite.  
-

Sakura had to avoid using chakra when fighting with or around Sasuke, and she made a note to start joining Lee on his morning runs, because her normal speed was **not** fast enough.

But then Sasuke copied all her taijutsu, too, and Sakura started mentally cursing bloodline geniuses and went after Naruto for a while.

She resorted to a high level genjutsu that Naruto didn't have the skill to cancel, one that tripled the amount of trees in the area until there was barely room to move between them and no way to see, and managed to catch the blond in that.

But before she could attack, the roots of the tree she was crouching behind spread and began to tangle around her feet.

_Wha__—Cancel!_ Sakura shoved herself away from the spot, clapping her hands into the necessary seal. **_Cancel_!**

The whole illusion disappeared. Naruto saw her moving to the right, but Sasuke was already coming out of the trees from the other side; so Naruto created a clone to tail her before sideswiping him.  
-

Sakura perched in a nearby tree, alternately looking for where the clone was hidden and watching the two of them fight. _He took over _my _illusion! That's_—

. . . a forbidden jutsu. The user had to undermine the other person's chakra to apply it, and if it wasn't done carefully, both would suffer the backlash.

_You **better **have expected me to know that_, she thought at Sasuke, and began planning a way to keep him distracted long enough that she could fight Naruto hand-to-hand.

But it confirmed Sakura's theory. Sasuke hadn't used any new jutsus since returning to Konoha. That could have meant that he was being intelligent, since all his sparring matches were either with the man who was technically his parole officer or the teenager who constantly had an anbu member monitoring him or the female jounin who didn't like him much. And even barring that, shinobi were taught to rarely reveal their tricks to people they had to leave alive, including teammates.

But it also could have meant that a lot of what Sasuke had learned was forbidden. In that case, he couldn't use them because Tsunade probably would have decided the only safe options were either to jail him, or to find a way to prevent him from using chakra ever again.

Sakura had been suspecting the latter. Apparently, she'd been right.  
-

After almost an hour, the fight was ended on account of Sasuke and Sakura having hit a dangerous low in their stamina and Sasuke announcing that someone was trying to break through the barrier.

"Hey, hey, so who won?" Naruto demanded, flopping onto the lone patch of grass left in the area.

Forty minutes ago, Sakura had slammed him out of a tree and into Sasuke and the ground. That had broken the rocky dirt, and when she jumped down herself, the impact had sent large portions of it jutting up.

Sasuke's expression had been _great_. Naruto had just run for cover.

"Aaaaurgh! At least **act** like you're tired!" Sakura snapped. She was sprawled out on one of the upended chunks.

"Hey," she called a second later to Sasuke, who was sitting against another chunk, "how did you see through my illusions?"

"How did you get so freakishly strong?" he replied.

_Fine_. "Do you know how Tsunade-sensei fights?"

". . . I heard stories. She taught you some kind of chakra manipulation?"

Sakura started to shake her head, then decided that was too much effort. "No, her strength is natural. I found a way to copy it."

Sasuke tilted his head back almost enough to look at her, but the angle was wrong. "It can be copied? Why doesn't everyone with your kind of control have it, then?"

Sakura grinned and held a finger to her lips. "Because there's a secret!"

Sasuke made a small amused noise. Then his almost-smile faded and he looked down again, toward Naruto. "How come you've been faking shitty chakra control all this time?"

Naruto folded his arms under his head and stared up at the sky. "Because . . . I've gotta work to separate mine from the fox's. If people knew I was in communication with it that much, they'd freak."

Sakura shifted on the rock. Sasuke paused for a moment, then nodded.

"I'd been working on it with Jiraiya before we had to come back," Naruto added defensively. "And then Sakura started sparring with me to help. And Oukei—he's an anbu, but he's cool—he'll fight with me sometimes too. So I can do it easily now."

"Good," Sasuke replied, with a tone that wasn't easily interpretable.

Naruto bent his head back over his arms and started to speak, but then he frowned. "Hey, the fight's over. Why're your eyes still weird?"

Sasuke closed them. "They won't go back."

Naruto blinked and rolled over onto his stomach. Sakura pulled herself a little closer to the edge of the rock.

"It's not—is it because of the dirt?" she asked, and started to sit up. "Let me look at them."

"It's not that," Sasuke replied. "I used the mangekyou sharingan to see through your illusions. My eyes don't go back to normal immediately afterward."

Naruto propped himself on his forearms, still frowning. "What? Why?"

"I don't know why," he said. "They just don't."

There was a slightly awkward silence at that. Sasuke shrugged a shoulder. "They'll be fine in half an hour. Just seeing through illusions isn't difficult."

"Okay." Sakura wasn't sure what he meant with that last sentence, but she let it go and flopped back down. "I'm not moving until at _least_ then, anyway. How much longer until the barrier falls?"

"They left," Sasuke replied. "They're probably getting an expert."

"We are **screwed** when the hag gets a hold of us," Naruto predicted.

"It was worth it," Sakura replied with a faint smile.

"Yeah," Sasuke echoed.

Naruto grinned.

—

Roughly twenty-seven minutes later, Sakura was starting to doze off. Naruto had curled up in one of the shady holes near the epicenter of the damage, and he was fast asleep if the snoring was any indication. Sasuke was still sitting back against the rock, eyes closed, but he seemed awake.

"They're coming," he said, right before the barrier disappeared. "From the north-west. They'll be here in under a minute."

Sakura rolled onto her back and stared at the sun in an attempt to wake up.

When the anbu reached their location—and it was a four-man squad, which Sakura felt was excessive—she could imagine their expressions beneath the masks as they took in the surroundings.

The leader stepped over the tree that one of Naruto's attacks had felled and cleared his throat. "Haruno-san, Uchiha-san, Uzumaki, if you three would like to return to the village now. . . ."

Naruto poked his head out of his lair. "What if we don't wanna return yet?" he said sleepily. "I was comfortable."

Sakura rolled her eyes and sat up. "Don't be a brat." She looked over. "Sasuke?"

Sasuke was still for another moment before opening his eyes. He blinked once, and then pushed himself onto his feet. "It's fine. Let's go."

Sakura slid off the rock, and Naruto pulled himself out of the crevice, and the anbu firmly escorted them back through the gates and to their respective homes.

Naruto whistled the whole way.


	13. ripple 13: Sasuke

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

The original version of this chapter didn't involve alcohol, but then Sailor Comet drew a fanart of Anko and Sasuke bitching about Orochimaru over drinks, and I had to play off it.  
———————

**-'**

After four weeks of half-seriously trying to maim each other, Anko and Sasuke decided they had filled in each other's gaps with all the jutsus they were able and willing to teach. And to celebrate no longer seeing each other on a regular basis, Anko decided to get herself and Sasuke drunk.

This, at least, was Kakashi's interpretation of the situation when Sasuke stumbled into his apartment at roughly half-past midnight.

"You don't smell of enough alcohol to be walking like that," Kakashi told him a moment later, and watched as Sasuke slid into an even pace mid-step.

_Not bad_, he acknowledged.

"Your sense of smell is better than hers," Sasuke informed him.

Still, he was drunk enough to require a little extra concentration on ordinary things. His shower took him a third longer than usual, and he banged his foot against the dresser when laying out the futon. Kakashi repressed a grin as Sasuke reflexively told his furniture off.

——

Sasuke decided in hindsight that, considering how much he'd been reminded about Orochimaru and the Hidden Sound recently, the dreams shouldn't have come as a surprise. Definitely not enough of one to say some of the things he did to Kakashi afterward, but Sasuke blamed that on personal stupidity and the alcohol.  
-

"Don't think because I understand I care," Anko told him the first day. "I survived. You will too, otherwise you'd be dead already."

"I don't want you to," Sasuke replied.

She smirked. "Yeah, I heard about how you're trying to alienate everyone, you cocky brat."

"At least I don't _still_ smell like cloves," Sasuke replied, giving her shoulder a pointed look.

Anko attacked him without mercy then.  
-

After Sasuke had been given some food and shown to a small apartment that was to be his for the time he remained in the Sound, a search party was sent out to collect the corpses of the Sound's Four. Orochimaru had been irritated to lose that much power, but Sasuke's body was worth the cost.

Besides, in the end he only lost three.

It was a stroke of luck—if Kabuto hadn't been sent with the group just in case, there was no way Tayuya would have survived long enough to be brought back to the Sound. As it was, she stayed unconscious for three days, and Kabuto exhausted himself healing all the internal bleeding and fractured and crushed bones. He didn't bother trying to get rid of the scars.

The first thing Tayuya asked when she woke up was where the fuck was that Sand bitch, and the second was where was Orochimaru.

Sasuke had been with the man at that time, since Orochimaru was giving him a tour of the main building when he was feeling less tired and less ready to rip his arm off on the slight chance it would stop the constant stinging pain. (He'd only seen the dungeons before, partly because that was where Orochimaru had been when he arrived and partly because Orochimaru had been testing whether Sasuke would run if exposed to the cruelty that the Hidden Sound was built on.)

He had been staring at Orochimaru's eyes while the man talked, despite his better judgment, because that was the only part of his features that Sasuke remembered--it was _weird_, damn it, he was _blond_, of all the fucking hair colors he was _blond_--so he almost appreciated the noise of someone storming down the corridor.

He heard "Get your hands off me, faggot!" and then Kabuto started to say something and then the door was shoved open. Sasuke tensed at the sound even though it had been announced, loudly; everything made him tense here, everything made him suspicious, and he was starting to think he would go crazy by the first month.

"Tayuya-chan," Orochimaru said genially, but his voice was tinged with a faint undercurrent.

Without hesitating, Tayuya stepped into the room and clasped her hands in front of her, dropping the crutches as she did so, and bowed deeply from the waist. Something cracked, and she hissed before stating: "I failed the mission. Kidoumaru and Jiroubou Sakon are dead. I don't ask forgiveness."

There was a long pause. Tayuya didn't look up. Sasuke blinked twice. Kabuto, still standing by the door, looked like he had better things to do than watch a person sign their own death warrant.

"Sasuke-kun arrived here," Orochimaru said at last. "That was all that was required. It's regrettable about those three, but they let themselves be killed."

Sasuke blinked a third time, slower. Tayuya didn't move.

"Hopefully I can find suitable replacements," the man added. "You'll need to train those people at that time. Until then, when you've recovered, teach Sasuke-kun seals so that we won't be defenseless."

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama," Tayuya replied. She dipped slightly lower with another hiss, and then managed to pick up the crutches before straightening and turning around.

When Kabuto made a motion to help her walk, Tayuya jerked out of reach. "Fuck **off**!" she snapped before clomping back down the corridor.

Kabuto's face was set in a blank expression, but he managed to convey his irritation through the way he tread heavily down the hall after her.

That was the first time Sasuke got an example of Orochimaru's methods, at least for upper ranks of the Soundnins.

It was one of the few times he heard Tayuya speak with any kind of sincere politeness, but it was also one of the few times he was in the same place with her and Orochimaru together.  
-

There were three rules for missions in the Sound village: don't die, don't let your teammates die, and complete the mission successfully.

Sasuke had been a little surprised at the order, but later found out the second rule applied only when on a team with other people who had a curse seal. Those were the ones handpicked by Orochimaru and who had come to the Sound specifically because of or for him. The rest of the village was mostly composed of families of people who had nowhere else to go—missingnins, criminals too strong for their villages but not strong enough to work on their own or be approached by Akatsuki, and the like—and if they had to die in order for those with curse seals to survive and the missions to be completed, that was no big deal.

The Hidden Sound did not measure talent by ranks such as genin, chuunin, jounin, or so on, because the village was divided cleanly by the curse seal. There were some who lacked the seal but were still important, like Kabuto and a few other spies who would have been compromised by such obvious marks, but they were clearly pointed out and ordered to be left alone. And there were a few non-shinobi villagers who had drifted in and weren't allowed to leave, but they usually didn't last very long.

Sasuke adjusted.  
-

Whenever Orochimaru woke him up hours before the dawn, Sasuke knew he was going to learn another forbidden jutsu. The dark, plus the seals and the illusions used as additional concealment, seemed excessive to Sasuke since Orochimaru always performed hand seals so quickly that he couldn't read them without the sharingan. But he limited his complaints to irritated noises as they moved through the marshland.

Today, Orochimaru cleared away enough weeds to build a small fire, before pulling out an ofuda and tracing the characters on it out slowly enough for Sasuke to memorize them.

The man waved the ofuda over the fire, and when the blood was dry, he tied it to a kunai. "This is called the Impure World Resurrection summoning, Sasuke-kun," Orochimaru informed him. "Now, please pay attention." He waited for Sasuke to shift his eyes to the sharingan before tucking the kunai into his belt and clapping his hands together.

A little less than two seconds later, Sasuke nodded abruptly to indicate that he had clearly seen all the hand seals. He watched as a coffin arose several centimeters in front of the ground where Orochimaru had slammed his hands down, facing away from them.

_What use could I have for this?_ he thought.

Beside him, Orochimaru stood up and pulled the kunai free again. "Do you know, Sasuke-kun, there is something very satisfying in defeating a person you strived after?" he said in the tone that always made Sasuke's fingers tense, and then the lid of the coffin fell away.

After fourteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds, Sasuke had won the fight against his father, and stood swaying on his feet in the middle of the charred marshland.

When Orochimaru set a hand on his shoulder, Sasuke lashed out instinctively, ducking under the grip and aiming a kick to the side of the man's knee. Orochimaru slithered away before it could land, and he grabbed Sasuke's burnt arm. In the fraction of a second that the boy lost to wincing, Orochimaru threw him back.

Sasuke skidded through the mud into a stop, katana already out. He had to force himself to keep it in a defensive position as Orochimaru smiled.

"Excellent work, Sasuke-kun," the man told him. "If a bit longer than a fight should last. Have Kabuto look at those burns when we've returned."

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama," he bit off.  
-

He noticed her presence when she used chakra to jump onto the roof behind him.

In the Sound, as in most ninja villages, people generally walked up to one another in a non-furtive fashion—because if they used stealth everyone would automatically assume the worst. Sasuke suspected Tayuya was waiting for him to reflexively attack her one day so she'd have an excuse for a fight.

"Go away," he said, not turning from his view of the sunset.

"Fuck you," she replied, and sat down on the edge of the roof half a meter away.

"You're not supposed to be talking to me."

"I didn't get orders not to," and then, "Besides, you'd like it better if you were alone."

Sasuke ignored the second sentence. "I'm surprised."

Tayuya snorted. "If every idiot got ostracized every time they did something idiotic, half the fucking village wouldn't talk."

Sasuke smirked.

"He's the one who wanted me to teach him the chidori," he replied. "It's not my fault it moves too fast for anyone without the sharingan to see properly."

There had been something intensely _satisfying_ about dodging the attack and slamming a foot into Orochimaru's chest hard enough to crack bone.

He would pay for it in little ways, he'd known that even before he agreed—Orochimaru had already decided there were too many minor issues with the village that were going to take up his time before he left on another trip in a week, so there was no chance for him to teach Sasuke anything more until he got back—but it had been worth it.

Even despite the look Orochimaru had given him as he stood up and licked away the dribble of blood from his lower lip and chin.

It wasn't anger, Sasuke would have _preferred_ anger, it wasn't even irritation or that polite condescension . . . just pure. . . .

He didn't like to think about it. Sasuke glared at the sun until his eyes watered.

"They'll be his soon enough," Tayuya said, pulling out her flute.

"Hn."

He glanced at her hands as she started playing, and noted that the polish was chipping again.

(Tayuya had lost a bet during one mission and wound up having to allow Setona to paint her nails. The five of them had been waiting for the new leader of the country—one of Orochimaru's spies, who'd been moved into place when the old leader was assassinated in a way that convinced the new one the country needed a ninja village—to be finished with a meeting so that they could escort him to Oto. Sasuke had noticed the color was purple and told her it made her hands ugly. Tayuya had been painting them purple ever since.)

The song she was playing was little more than a variation on the chromatic scale. When Tayuya had been brought back from her fight with Shikamaru and Temari, her left index and pinky fingers were broken, but Kabuto had been too busy trying to bring her legs back from their pulped state to do more than quickly set them in a brace.

It turned out that the two fingers had set crooked, just enough that the index finger only half-covered the hole on her flute, making several notes sharp or flat when they shouldn't be and rendering almost half of her illusions useless.

She'd invented a few new ones to make up for the loss, but in the end Orochimaru decided she had to rebreak the fingers and set them again, properly. So now that they were healed, Tayuya was running through basic practices yet again.

Her opinion of the situation was all directed at Kabuto for fucking up the first time. She didn't say a word about Orochimaru's decision.

Sasuke was aware he was going to have to kill the man outside of the Sound village, or he would never escape before the people with more loyalty than hatred got to him.

But that could be managed. When he left, if he made catching himself too difficult for others, eventually Orochimaru would hunt him down personally. And when he won that fight, even if he had to hide for a few months because he'd be half-dead from the overuse of chakra, it would _have_ to be enough to finally attract Itachi's attention. And out of everything Orochimaru was teaching him, there had to be something that would give Sasuke enough of an edge to kill him.

It didn't have to be flashy. It didn't have to be an uncontested difference of skill (as if it ever would), he didn't need to laugh at his brother's blood on his hands or say "This was for our family" or any of the crap that he had used to think was necessary. Sasuke just needed to see Itachi dead. By this point, that could do.

After that. . . .

After that, he'd be free of the debt he'd incurred by being the only one left alive, and he could start over somewhere else. Not in any of the established ninja villages, he'd be known too quickly there and the Hidden Leaf was powerful enough to force an extradition. But he could go to a village that was still in the middle of forming, or work freelance for a while until he'd saved enough money. Then he'd find some woman from a respectable-enough family or at least with enough personal talent, get married, and start rebuilding the clan. Then he'd pass down most of his knowledge to his children and live, until he finally died from a mission or until he succumbed to the sharingan. Either of those fates would be acceptable, but he found something debasing in the thought of retiring.

Eventually. There would be time to work out the fine details later. He had another year and seven months that he could remain training in the Sound, and there was no reason to waste the opportunity he'd paid so much for.

Tayuya changed to a new song. Sasuke watched the sun set.

She left after it was gone.  
-

One of the key elements of the Sound was the anonymity. Unlike the Leaf, when the Sound shinobi were on missions they all wore the same uniforms, so that this ninja couldn't be told apart from that ninja or that ninja over there or a dozen other ninjas to the left, except by certain physical characteristics like height or skin color. The Sound's new Five had different uniforms, but they still matched. Small objects like jewelry or different shoes were acceptable, and the Five could wear their hair however they wanted. Those things were just considered minor bits of defiance.

A certain amount of insubordination was inevitable, since many of the most powerful ninjas Orochimaru had collected had arrived as a result of their headstrong attitudes. It was actually expected by him—his second-in-command was still Kabuto after all these years, and only a blind person couldn't notice that the younger man manipulated everything placed under his power—and tolerated to a degree.

But there was a line that couldn't be crossed. Trying to leave the Sound was very, very far over that line. Contacting an enemy village (and they were all enemy villages in the end, even the allied Hidden Mist) to do so was also frowned on. And Junji only made things worse for himself by trying to go back home to the Sand, the Leaf's closest allies.

Yesterday afternoon, Orochimaru had called Sasuke, Tayuya, Kazuo, and Koushun into his library in the main building, introduced them to Setona, told them that the teenager was going to be their new teammate, and then requested they do something about Junji.

Late this morning, they picked Junji up from the medical center. After they had informed him of their decision, Kabuto had severed Junji's hamstrings, broken all ten of his fingers and tied his hands together, and for good measure cut out and cauterized his tongue. He left the three of them to tie up the teenager in the net themselves.

They then walked through the main street, because this part was a display for the village. Kazuo and Koushun dragged the net, so Tayuya and Sasuke carried their shovels as well as their own. Setona trailed after them, not sure where to look. Junji screamed what were probably supposed to be obscenities at them for a while, until the dust started choking him.

The pit was outside the village—Sasuke and Kazuo had put their students to work digging it yesterday evening. Kazuo and Koushun threw the net in before taking back their shovels. Junji started screaming again.

After the first dozen shovelfuls of dirt had been throw in, some on Junji's face, and the teenager was still screaming, Kazuo picked up a rock and threw it at his chest. When Junji curled in on himself, Kazuo said tonelessly: "Orochimaru-sama makes the promises that no one else will. If you were afraid of the price, you should have rotted out there with the rest of the trash."

Junji choked out something incoherent and began crying.

Tayuya glared. "Fucking coward traitor. . . ." She turned to Setona. "_This_ is what'll happen to you if you wuss out. The same goes for everyone," she added, looking over at Sasuke.

"Don't speak above your place, 'Tayuya-chan'," he replied.

Sasuke had decided that it could be useful to know how to sound like Orochimaru. The mimicry wasn't exact—some syllables just required the man's tongue—but it was close. Everyone was silent for a moment, and Setona gave him an analyzing look.

Then Koushun crouched near the edge, staring down at Junji with an arm resting on his shovel. "Hey," he said, looking up at Sasuke, "doesn't this seem a little excessive to Sasuke-san?"

"If it prevents any other acts, it isn't excessive," Sasuke said, throwing another shovelful of dirt in. He looked over at Setona. "You. You've got a shovel for a reason."

"Right," Setona said, picking it up and moving closer to the pit.

They only filled it to half a meter above Junji's body. Then they sat down and played cards for an half an hour. Then Sasuke noticed that Setona was cheating with some impressively quick handwork, and killed another ten minutes sparring with him.

Then they dug Junji's body back up and examined it.

"He's dead," Kazuo determined, after feeling for a pulse.

"Kazuo-san should stab him anyway," Koushun spoke up from where he was dozing lizard-like in the sun.

Sasuke shook his head. "That'll leave blood."

Kazuo looked at him over the edge of the pit. "What about snapping his neck? They'll see the dirt well enough."

"No. I want it clear he was buried alive."

Kazuo shrugged. "What if he's faking it, managed to live?"

"There's five of us," Sasuke said, folding his arms. "We can handle one weak ninja in a net."

"Throw him **out** already," Tayuya snapped. "This is a waste of time."

They dragged the net back through the main street, before dropping it off at the crematorium and breaking apart for lunch.  
-

Koushun was by far the politest of the Five. Tayuya had bullied him mercilessly when he'd first been placed in their team, and neither Kazuo, Junji, nor Sasuke had been able to figure out what the fuck Orochimaru saw in him—until their first fight against an enemy, when they met his other personality.

The only downsides of the other Koushun were that he didn't distinguish teammates from enemies, and he didn't register pain. Even using the sharingan, Sasuke found he and the others had to almost kill the teenager to keep him unconscious long enough to revert. It was annoying to have to drag him back to the Sound, but the only time Sasuke really hated dealing with the guy was when there were other people involved.

They'd gotten back from another escorting mission, as boring as usual though Kazuo had killed one would-be political assassin, and gone out for dinner as soon as the spy was in the main building. Junji had split apart from the rest of them and already headed to his apartment.

"He's hiding something," Tayuya said flatly, biting a piece of chicken off the skewer. "We should beat it out of him."

"Orochimaru's letting him get away with it," Sasuke replied. "Leave it alone."

Tayuya tore off a cherry tomato with more vigor than necessary. In the lull, they heard someone at a table on the opposite side whisper: "—hear that? Not even respected among **them**, we—"

The voice stopped abruptly, and the lull turned to silence. Kazuo, Tayuya, and Koushun stood up.

The man who'd spoken shoved his chair back, instinctively moving away. The other two at the table with him were gauging the distance to the door. "I didn't mean—no! It's not—"

Sasuke pulled a kunai from his pack and threw it into the man's forehead. The remaining two men immediately backed away.

Tayuya looked down at him with disgust. "You're a damn bleeding heart."

"I don't waste time fighting people that much weaker," Sasuke replied, picking up his tea.

"It's not about fighting," Koushun said, and popped his neck, "it's about ripping out their guts and stuffing them down their throats."

Sasuke, Tayuya, and Kazuo shared a look.

They got Koushun down and unconscious in under four minutes, because practice was making them faster.

Tayuya was burning away the barrier ofuda she'd thrown onto the corners of the walls, while Sasuke untangled the wires from around Koushun's body. Kazuo was picking through the wreckage and checking the bodies.

"Any important ones?" Sasuke asked.

Kazuo nudged a child's body with his toe, then crouched down to check the pulse. "This was one of my students. He was really starting to excel in ninjutsu."

Sasuke made a noise in the back of his throat that could be interpreted several ways. He started winding the wire up.

Kazuo shrugged and stood. "Most of them'll live. Tell someone to get the medicnins."

"Move it!" Tayuya yelled, and three people broke away from the crowd outside and darted towards the medical building.

Sasuke saw Koushun's movements before the other teenager fully regained consciousness, and realized he hadn't let the sharingan slip back yet. "Hey."

Kazuo stepped closer. Tayuya picked up half a broken table and brandished it.

Koushun sat up. He looked around the restaurant, and then pressed a hand to the bleeding side of his face.

"Ah," he said. "Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone."

Tayuya muttered something and dropped the table. Sasuke kicked him in the back.

"Go home," he said. "You're irritating."

"Good night," Koushun agreed, before limping out of the building.

As the three of them left as well, Tayuya turned to the owner and said, "Since we took care of that trouble for you, the meal was free."

"Of course," the man replied, bowing slightly. "Thank you very much."

When Sasuke walked past the restaurant before dawn the next morning, on his way to train in private for an hour, he saw that the lanterns were still lit and the owner's family was still trying to clean blood out of the cracks in the floor and walls.  
-

At fourteen, Sasuke found himself responsible for teaching the children of the first generation of Soundnins.

He and Kazuo were the only ones in the group who were teachers. Tayuya was training one girl who'd displayed spiritual powers in onmyoujutsu, but that was all; and Junji had been put to work elsewhere a month ago, and Koushun had been removed from teaching duties the day after he snapped and killed three students before Sasuke and Kazuo could get to him. It was irritating to deal with eight-year-olds who couldn't hit targets as precisely with their kunai as he had been able to, but Sasuke put up with it until the first set of tests.

The day after he'd turned in the papers, he noticed that the lowest overall scorers were no longer in the class, and on his desk was a little note in the administrator's handwriting saying to encourage those that had shown talent in one specific area but were lacking in the others to work harder.

After half a day, Sasuke dismissed the class and demanded to be moved to teaching those old enough to at least know how the hell to teleport and produce effective clones.

After the deliberate lapse of two days, he was transferred to the graduating class, where the weeding-out process was already completed.

The graduating class was good. The majority of them were average, and "average" in the Hidden Sound was equal to "above-average" in most other places. Some of them were above-average, and Sasuke knew they were destined to become experiments, so he kept more distance between himself and them than the others. There was one boy who'd shown an excessive amount of talent, but he had already been noticed and was receiving personal training outside of daily classes. Another girl had been apprenticed under Kabuto, but Kabuto had a way of losing apprentices like other people lost splinters, so Sasuke didn't expect that to last long.

The day before graduation, Sasuke had looked at the room and reminded himself that most of the students were only two or three years younger than him.

They were also a whole two and three years younger. Life in Oto produced an early hardness that life in Konoha hadn't, but still, they had yet to kill anyone, or fight against anyone outside their village, or even to pass the genin survival tests.

_Kids_, Sasuke thought, and said, "Graduation is tomorrow. You'll be receiving your assigned teams that day or the next. Your teammates are going to become the most important people in your lives for the next few years, at the least, so don't complain."

Most of the class nodded without speaking, so the snicker from the left corner was even louder than intended. Sasuke looked over. "What is it? Akino."

"The 'most important people'?" the boy repeated. Then he added in an apologetic tone, "I'm sorry, Uchiha-sensei, I forgot—you came from the Hidden Leaf, right?"

There was complete silence in the room. Sasuke's purpose to Orochimaru wasn't known outside the immediate circle around the man, so while the rest of the village saw and imitated the deference given him by the upper-level shinobi, they didn't know what it was for and generally assumed it was because he was one of the Five. And Akino was one of the few people who lacked respect for those with the curse seal, despite being badly beaten up for it several times.

Sasuke tapped a finger on the desk. "It's not a matter of personal liking—you kids are assholes, and few of you are going to get along. But your teammates are not just people you'll be training and going on missions with. They're going to be the only ones in this village you can ever dream will watch your back."

He let his gaze sweep the room as he continued. "Most of you were born in Oto. Some of you are orphans, some of you are bastards, a lot of you only have one shinobi parent. All of you are going to die from the Sound, either for it or by it. After you graduate and prove you're not tactically useless through the genin training, you're going to join the lower-level trash and spend your lives fighting well enough to keep your forehead protector while not standing out enough to wind up as experiments, until you get killed." He stopped scanning the room at those words and focused on Akino. "And your teammates _might_ give a damn, if you haven't been too much trouble to them."

Sasuke stopped tapping his finger and studied the room again. "So try to avoid overt animosity, and don't kill each other. Understand?"

A few kids nodded silently. Most of them were staring at the floor, or the wall, or the windows, or anything that wasn't him.

"Then class is dismissed," Sasuke said. "Get out."

He disappeared from the village shortly after, and when Orochimaru finally sent several snakes to locate him a little before three a.m., they found Sasuke dozing in a tree on the outskirts of the forest.

The adder that found him later complained about being thrown roughly to the ground. Sasuke told it not to drape itself around his neck, because he couldn't be responsible for his reflexes. Orochimaru suggested he apologize and not be caught sleeping again.  
-

Not long after Sasuke managed to start hitting Orochimaru in their fights, a new child arrived at the Sound. He was placed in Sasuke's class soon after, and the teenager never figured out whether it was meant to be a warning or if Orochimaru just thought it was amusing to have them together.

He recognized that the boy was his spare immediately. That was one of the few times Sasuke had smiled while he was at Oto; Ichiro's presence meant that Orochimaru acknowledged there was a possibility, however slight, that he might escape before the three years were up.

That pride was part of the reason he agreed to the order to teach Ichiro a few of his personal jutsus. Most of the reason was more fatalistic than Sasuke would ever admit to being—if he _did_ fail to escape, he wasn't going to let everything about his clan die out.

"Pathetic," Sasuke announced when Ichiro failed to perform the Great Fireball jutsu on the first try.

"Fuck you," the boy dared to reply because they were alone, and attempted it again. Sasuke folded his arms. After the fourth failure, he snorted derisively and walked away, leaving Ichiro in the marsh.

Two days later, there was a banging on his door hours before dawn. Orochimaru was never so graceless—Sasuke took the katana with him when he went to open it.

Outside he found Ichiro slouching against the frame, bandages taped over his burns, fingers completely wrapped, and wearing a smirk. "I mastered it."

_Fast_, Sasuke acknowledged. Outwardly he gave the boy a bored look and said, "It took you long enough."  
-

Orochimaru was the one who told him about Naruto being the fox demon's container, though he did so indirectly.

Sasuke had arrived at the man's library at the time stated in the message, only to find he wasn't there. A medium-sized scroll tied with a delicate silver cord was sitting on the middle of one of the tables.

Sasuke waited for half an hour, tapping his foot slightly. When Orochimaru remained absent, he pulled a chair up to the table and checked the scroll for all the dangerous sealing jutsus he knew the man used. There had been only a low-level one on it, but later Sasuke decided Orochimaru had decreased the protection for that particular day.

When he opened the scroll, he found a perfect copy of the Fourth's sealing method for the fox demon, in Orochimaru's handwriting. The Third had destroyed the original scroll, worried about the consequences of Naruto or any of Konoha's enemies finding it, but not before a young Kabuto had managed to sneak into the Hokage tower, steal it, take it to Orochimaru and bring it back unnoticed.

Sasuke had stared at the scroll long after he was finished reading it, and he didn't notice Orochimaru's presence in the room until the faint scent of cloves reached his nose.

"Why did you want me to read this," he said in a low voice.

"I thought you might be curious," Orochimaru replied. "But, I suppose you're right . . . it doesn't matter anymore, does it?"

Sasuke's grip clenched around the paper. Orochimaru leaned over his shoulder and opened his fingers, before setting his hand on the table.

"This is a valuable scroll, Sasuke-kun; please don't ruin it."  
-

"I don't get it," Setona said one day, as he watched Tayuya and Sasuke walk off, ignoring each other. The Five had just broken apart after returning from a mission scouting the Hidden Mist—the tortured corpse of a high ranking jounin had been found there, and rumor had it that the Hidden Leaf was responsible, which meant Konoha had likely learned about their alliance with the Sound.

"Stop staring or you'll get a broken arm," Kazuo replied, starting to walk away. "Just take one of the trash or the villagers. They're not allowed to say no."

"It doesn't make sense," Setona replied, falling in step with him. Koushun followed them. "I mean, why the hell . . . of all the people. . . ."

"She's a girl," Kazuo said sagely. "And he's too sentimental."

Setona raised an eyebrow. "'Sentimental'? That cold bastard?"

"I heard Sasuke-san came here just so he could get the power to kill the man who killed his family," Koushun said.

"He did," Kazuo affirmed. "And if **that's** not sentimental, what the hell is?"

"Huh." Setona looked over his shoulder again.

Kazuo glanced at him. "Seriously, stop staring at him. He'll let you die on a mission. And Orochimaru-sama will let him get away with it."

Setona looked forward again.  
-

Tayuya and Setona had had issues with each other for a while, and for a long time Sasuke thought it something to do with them both being genjutsu users and feeling threatened by each other. Or that Tayuya thought Setona was trying to steal her jutsus. Since Setona had been living as a thief before Orochimaru found him, and because he expressed a little too much interest in Sasuke's ability to copy others' techniques, Sasuke could understand the latter. But either way it meant that he had to keep breaking up their fights whenever they got too deadly or started using their curse seals.

Setona usually backed off when Sasuke threw the two of them apart, but Tayuya just shifted her target from the other teenager to him.

They always managed to walk to the medical building on their own afterward, if only because they lashed out whenever Koushun tried to help.

Kabuto was out this particular time, so Sasuke pulled himself onto a cot and fell asleep to recharge. He woke up when the door opened, but kept his breathing even.

Kabuto made an irritable noise at seeing the two of them in his rooms yet again, but he started rattling through the cabinets for bandages and ointments and an icepack for Tayuya's face.

"Your flirting is working me to death," he commented, just loud enough that it wasn't under his breath.

Sasuke's foot twitched imperceptibly.

". . . I'm not flirting with that shithead," Tayuya snarled. "I would never touch Orochimaru-sama's property, I'm not a disloyal bastard like **you**."

"True, Tayuya-san," Kabuto replied. "I shouldn't have assumed . . . after all, you never struck me as a girl who was interested in doomed romances."

There was a loud crash as something heavy and metallic was kicked to the floor. Tayuya slammed the door when she left.

After a moment, Sasuke opened his eyes to see Kabuto picking up various medical supplies scattered around an overturned cabinet.

"Pathetic," he said, closing his eyes again.

"Who is, Sasuke-sama?" Kabuto asked politely.

Sasuke left while Kabuto was still cleaning up. He limped back to his apartment and fixed his wounds himself.  
-

The one time Sasuke didn't interfere between Setona and Tayuya's fights was when he overheard Setona call her a cradle-robber. That time Kazuo finally stepped in when Tayuya started to summon a shikigami; and when he managed to force them apart, Setona had three broken ribs and a broken cheekbone, Tayuya had a punctured lung, and Kazuo got two shurikan lodged in his spine for his efforts.

When Orochimaru questioned him about it later, Sasuke said that he had decided it would be better for the two of them to work out their aggression once and for all.

Orochimaru had been displeased, but Setona was much slower to pick fights or take the bait afterwards. Kazuo didn't speak to Sasuke for a week.  
-

He jerked away from her at the comment, as far as he could go without falling off the stool. "I didn't sleep with him."

Anko just smirked and gave him a clearly disbelieving look. Sasuke glared, hand tightening around his glass.

Anko tilted her head to the other side and shrugged her shoulder with a little sway, before pouring herself another drink. The curse seal under her fishnet—the one that still hadn't faded yet after three years, the one exactly like Sasuke's (a fact he hadn't missed and which kept him from underestimating her)—was emphasized with the motion.

"You missed out," she said, tossing the drink back.  
-

By the time he lost the fight, he was so exhausted that the anger at letting himself be caught was almost less than the relief that it was _over_ for the day.

One of his arms was trapped underneath him, and the other was pinned to the ground just far enough out that he couldn't reach any of his remaining weapons. One of his legs was free, but the other one was twisted out at the knee, straining his muscles badly. He could have shifted so that it wasn't so painful, but he would have had to be able to push himself up slightly for that, and Orochimaru was kneeling on his chest.

The man tsked. "You're still not good enough, Sasuke-kun. Itachi isn't going to be bothered with killing you until you can keep his interest." Orochimaru smirked faintly. "At this rate, you won't even manage to run from me."

Sasuke glared, because he didn't have the strength to throw the man off and continue the fight. Orochimaru's smile widened a bit, and he stood.

Sasuke was glad to see him favor his right side as he did—it meant Orochimaru hadn't deflected _all_ his attacks. He was getting better.

He would get better.  
-

There was still a hand on his arm.

—

The sharingan warned Kakashi that Sasuke was going to move a half a second before the teenager was up and attacking. He pushed himself back out of reach while he could.

He caught the first kunai in his right hand, the second in his left, deflected the third with the one in his right, deflected the fourth with his left, and the fifth one slipped through the gap and grazed his ribs.

Part of Kakashi wondered _Where__ is he **keeping** these?_ while the rest of him threw the two kunai in his hands to the side and shoved himself up. He flipped over the leg that Sasuke kicked at his chest.

When he landed, while Sasuke was turning around, Kakashi turned as well and lashed out, slamming his forearm into the side of Sasuke's neck. Sasuke bent partially at that, and it gave Kakashi enough of an opening to grab his right arm.

Sasuke reflexively swung his left away, but Kakashi had a longer reach and caught it as well. He jerked both of Sasuke's arms to their opposite sides, pulling just enough that the shoulders were ready to dislocate.

"_Sasuke_."

He froze at the sound of Kakashi's voice. The room was silent, except for the sound for their breathing and Sasuke's heart beating much too fast for such a short fight, even if it had been a surprise.

Then Sasuke's hands clenched and he tried to pull his arms back to their proper sides—not with the smooth motion of a ninja, but with the jerky struggle of a teenager caught in a stronger man's grip. Kakashi let go and settled back on his heels.

"You." Sasuke was shaking faintly. "You—don't do that. **Don't**. You know be—"

When Sasuke cut himself off, Kakashi said quietly, "Right."

Sasuke didn't turn to look at him. The teenager set his hands firmly on the floor and stayed in his crouch.

When Sasuke stopped shaking, Kakashi explained, "You were talking in your sleep. I called your name. . . . But I'll throw something instead next time."

Not surprisingly, Sasuke had tensed up again. Kakashi stood, almost making a noise at the sting from his ribs.

Almost was enough. "Did I hit you?" Sasuke asked.

Kakashi answered because the question seemed more concerned—or at least disturbed—for him than curious about whether Sasuke had gotten past his defenses. "It's just a scratch."

It was a little deeper than a scratch, he noticed when he cleaned it up in the bathroom, but not bad enough to need bandaging. The more annoying thing was having his shirt ripped.

He didn't hear Sasuke picking up the kunai, but when he returned to the room they were all hidden and Sasuke was sitting on the futon, staring at the floor. Kakashi walked past him to the bed and pushed the blankets down.

"He never laid a hand on me," Sasuke said abruptly.

Kakashi's hand stilled for a moment. Then he shoved the blankets further back and sat on the bed. "Okay."

"He didn't."

"I believe you."

Sasuke snorted, but he was still glaring at the floor. "Anko doesn't. And Naruto said . . . about the. . . ." Sasuke clenched his jaw for a moment. "But he never touched . . . that wasn't how he did things. He just promised whatever you want the most and waits for you to accept it on his terms."

Kakashi paused again when Sasuke lapsed into the present tense. After a minute passed slowly and the teenager didn't speak, he cleared his throat. "Perhaps . . . since you've got the reflexes of someone living in the middle of a war. . . ."

"That's the kind of training I requested from him," Sasuke replied. "Being off my guard was unacceptable."

Kakashi could better believe him now—he knew how masochistic Sasuke would get in his training if left to his own devices. "That's not a good way to go if you don't have to," he said mildly. "The exhaustion catches up to you too quickly, and in the end you're never fighting at your best."

"I got plenty of sleep when I learned to conceal myself well enough," Sasuke replied.

The pitch of his voice had changed slightly, and Kakashi could tell that Sasuke no longer wanted to be talking about Orochimaru, no longer wanted to be talking about anything to do with the Sound, didn't want to be talking at all.

"Hm," Kakashi said, before lying down and pulling up the blanket. Several seconds later, he heard Sasuke do the same.

—

The next morning, Sasuke avoided Kakashi with an amazing amount of skill, considering it was a two-room apartment. He ate dinner with Naruto and didn't return home until Kakashi had long pretended to go to bed.

The day after that, Sasuke began looking at available apartments.


	14. ripple 14: Hinata

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto, but I refuse to call the Hyuuga curse seal teal. It's just weird.  
——————

—

Autumn had come, and some of the trees had already lost their leaves when Sasuke moved out of Kakashi's apartment.

He'd gone through the whole process in the open, from reading the papers to meeting with the landlord and arranging the payments. (The **high** payments, but it had been difficult for Sasuke to find anyone willing to rent an apartment to him at all--not only was his loyalty still questionable, but it was obvious that his presence would bring Naruto to the building regularly.) There was no official objection, and Sasuke interpreted that as a sign his house arrest had been lifted.

Despite the fact he'd been at Kakashi's for three months, he managed to fit everything he was taking into one large box. He could have used a smaller one if he had worn his weapons instead of packing them, but Sasuke wasn't going to press his fortune that far yet.

That morning, he set the box by the door and formally thanked Kakashi for his questionable hospitality, before apologizing for adding to the kunai scars in the wall. Kakashi had replied with an equally formal acceptance. That had made Sasuke blink, but he refused to show interest in the sides of the man he hadn't seen and left.

Kakashi would have been surprised at the sudden departure, if he hadn't been expecting it from that one night onward. He was aware that Sasuke's first instinct after revealing too much of himself was to flee, emotionally or physically.

—

Sakura and Naruto showed up at his new apartment before noon. Sasuke was already unpacked.

"Where's the furniture?" Naruto immediately asked.

"Hidden," Sasuke replied.

"Why would--hey! Jerk."

"Don't ask stupid questions."

Sakura studied at the apartment with her hands on her hips. It was a one-room affair, not including the bathroom, and it was smaller than his old one, but the barrenness made it seem large. "Do you even have dishes and stuff? Or pots? Or a futon?"

"I'm going to go back to my house later," Sasuke said. "I'll look through the storage for that stuff then."

Naruto had wandered over to the window, but at that he glanced back at Sasuke. Sakura gave him a careful look. "Won't that stuff be . . . dusty? Or molding?"

"All the property is still technically in my brother's name," Sasuke told her, "because I was too young to officially transfer it to myself as next-of-kin. My personal bank account is running low, and I can't afford to buy much if I want to pay rent. I don't know how long it's going to take for me to be given missions again."

"Ah," Sakura murmured.

"Hell, I would've keep leeching off Kakashi-sensei," Naruto said. Sasuke gave him an annoyed look.

"What?" Naruto replied. "You got out of paying the rent, right? Even if you chipped in for groceries and stuff, that's a pretty good deal."

"It's not a 'good deal' if I'm being constantly analyzed," Sasuke said flatly. "I'd rather be alone."

Naruto rolled his eyes and opened the window, leaning out.

"When were you going over there?" Sakura asked. "We'll help move stuff."

Sasuke hesitated for a moment before saying, "After dark."

Sakura nodded.

"You know this view sucks, right?" Naruto asked. "All you can see is a wall."

"It's more strategic than a street accessible one."

Naruto pulled his head back inside. "Naw, there's enough room between the buildings that someone could still get in. You just got cheated."

"Whatever."

—

While Naruto was hauling a chair from the storage room to the Uchihas' front gate, Sakura asked Sasuke if he would keep her notes at his apartment.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Tsunade-sensei is getting suspicious," she replied, packing an old rice cooker into the box they'd brought. "And no one will think it strange if _you_ constantly sweep your apartment."

Sasuke nodded and checked the balance of a small table.

—

Sakura's notes and scrolls had doubled from the last time he saw them. It took Sasuke four visits to sneak everything back to his apartment.

He'd given her descriptions of three seals that he felt would work, based on the small information from the Fourth's scroll. The trouble was that one of them would be useless if the fox demon's chakra was . . . Sasuke didn't want to say "sentient," but if it **acted** like it was sentient, it wouldn't be restrained by the seal.

"I think it is," Sakura had said without explaining, and then spent another three days trying to find scraps of information to back up her statement.

On the fourth visit, Naruto had seen them on the street and gone with them to the apartment. Sakura joined Lee in the kitchen and started drying the dishes, after directing Sasuke to the right spot on the shelves.

Naruto had looked up from the cards he was shuffling and given Sasuke a curious look when he folded the papers and packed them and the scroll into his emptied medical pouch. Sasuke ignored him, so Naruto finally asked what was going on.

"It's for that project I mentioned," Sakura said from the kitchen. "I have to do some work with seals, so Sasuke's looking at that part for me."

"It's got seals, too?" Naruto said, dealing a round to himself and Sasuke. "Geez! What is it, some top secret medical thing the hag's got you working on?"

"No," Sakura replied, "Tsunade-sensei. . . . It's something I'm studying for myself. I just can't talk about it much because there's so little I know that I'd sound crazy. I just . . . I'm _sure_ I'm right, I just can't get any information to prove it. . . ."

She set a glass down heavily on the counter. "Aurgh! I could find it, I know I . . . if I just had more **time**!"

In the brief pause after her words, Sasuke snickered.

When Naruto looked over, the other teenager had the hand holding his cards pressed against his mouth to hold back his laughter. He stayed like that for another three seconds, shoulders shaking, and Sakura glanced over the kitchen counter as well.

Then the laughter faded, and Sasuke got a contemplative look.

". . . Freak," Naruto said. "Gimme your cards, I saw them."

When Naruto was reshuffling the deck, Sasuke said Sakura's name.

"What," she replied, in a noticeably clipped tone.

Sasuke kept his eyes on Naruto's hands and watched her from his peripheral vision. "What happened during that month you took off to train with the Hokage that made you hate Mihara so much?"

Sakura dropped the plate she was drying. Lee caught it before it hit the floor.

"How'd you learn about--you asked Kakashi-sensei, didn't you?"

"Neither of you were telling me anything," Sasuke replied.

Sakura took the plate from Lee and resumed drying it, turning her back on Sasuke. "Being away from him for so long made me realize how much I didn't like him."

"That's it?"

Lee gave him a warning look over her shoulder. Sakura was still drying the plate. "Yes."

Naruto had turned around, so he saw Lee's expression as well. He glanced between Sakura and Sasuke.

"It got more annoying after she came back," he said in an attempt to mediate. "We were at war with the Hidden Mist by then, too, so we had to go on more missions with that bastard."

Sasuke looked over at him. "It was that long ago?"

Naruto scratched the back of his head. "Yeah . . . some time when we learned about the Mist being allied with the Sound. The Mist accused us of attacking them, and Tsunade said they brought it on themselves by doing that."

Sasuke leaned back slightly. ". . . I remember that. We were sent to scout the Mist, since one of their jounin was tortured to death and they said it was Konoha's work."

"Oh," Sakura said. "Lee, that sponge is threadbare. Use another."

"I haven't bought a new one yet," he replied.

"Okay. I'll go get one before I forget." She dried her hands on the towel and walked out of the kitchen. "I'll see you guys tomorrow," she told Sasuke and Naruto as she pulled on her boots.

Presumably, if Sakura were going to go buy a sponge for Lee, she would be coming back to Lee's apartment. They were being kicked out.

Naruto looked at the entryway, then gave Sasuke a glare because he _knew_ it was somehow his fault, before struggling to get his shoes on and catch up to her. "Hey, hey, Sakura-chan! Wait up!" he called as he pulled the door shut.

Sasuke collected the scattered cards and pushed them into a deck, thinking.

"I don't want to be rude, Sasuke-kun," Lee said from the kitchen, "but please don't be here when Sakura returns."

Sasuke started to speak, but changed his mind at the last minute--mostly because he doubted Lee would answer his question if Sakura wasn't there. And partly because he was smart enough to not need confirmation.

He put the deck away before leaving.

—

Sakura was already in the street when Naruto managed to get his shoes completely tied.

"Hey, Sakura-_chan!_"

She slowed down a little, and he jumped the stair railing to catch up to her. "You know better than to listen to him. He wouldn't understand about it."

"It's not. . . ."

She was quiet for half a block before finally saying, "I didn't want Kakashi-sensei to tell him. We were too mean."

Naruto made a noise under his breath. "That bastard deserved it."

Sakura shook her head sharply. "No, we were cruel. Just because we were sick of being told to forget about Sasuke, it wasn't. . . ."

When she trailed off, Naruto hesitated for a little bit before sliding his hands in his pockets. "You aren't cruel," he told her. "And you didn't like him. So there had to have been something weird about him, even if we don't know it."

Sakura laughed under her breath, but it sounded wrong.

"You shouldn't trust my judgment, Naruto," she said a minute later. "I'm not . . . there's some stuff I've. . . ." She smiled faintly, not looking at him. "There's some things that you wouldn't like me anymore if you knew about them."

Naruto made a disbelieving noise and waved her statement off. "Nothing could make me hate Sakura-chan," he said.

Sakura looked at the ground, still wearing that sad half-smile, and didn't reply.

—

That night, Sakura was woken up a couple hours before dawn by the rattling of her window.

Her first garbled thoughts were that something had happened to Lee, to Naruto, they'd finally tried to arrest Sasuke, Ino had gone on a mission with her team just yesterday and she hadn't come back yet maybe something had. . . .

Then she woke up enough to realize that the noise wasn't the tapping of a messenger bird, but of someone trying to quietly bang on the pane. She got up and opened the window.

Naruto swung inside. "He's gone!"

Sakura stared. "What?"

"Sasuke," Naruto hissed. "He left, I felt it a couple minutes ago--he teleported, bastard, I dunno where but it's probably--"

Sakura waved a hand when his voice started rising, and Naruto stopped. She sat down on the bed, shut her eyes, and pressed her palms to her temples.

She didn't bother asking if he was sure. Naruto could pick up her and Sasuke's presence from kilometers away.

Sakura pushed her hair back from her face and gave a quiet, frustrated scream. "You know what? When that guy comes back, you _can_ break his legs. I'll hold him down for you."

Naruto crouched, looking up at her face. ". . . So, you're sure he's coming back?"

Sakura blinked her eyes open and looked at him. "Yeah," she said, letting her hands fall to her lap. "Sasuke promised to do something for me. He won't . . . he won't leave to chase Itachi until after that."

Naruto nodded, and Sakura was again a little disturbed in the complete faith he put in her. "Okay. What should we do?"

Sakura ran a hand through her hair and held it back. "I guess. . . . Pretend nothing happened. It's not like we spend every day with him; just act like everything's normal. As long as he's back before tomorrow, no one should notice."

"What if--?"

Naruto didn't finish the question, and Sakura shrugged a shoulder to show she didn't know what they'd say then either.

—

Despite the laws of drama and Murphy, nothing went wrong.

The day passed. Sakura spent a few hours working in the hospital in place of Shizune and then sparred with Lee, Naruto helped Iruka grade test papers (in theory) after classes were out for the day, and Kakashi was tangled in the same meeting with the Lord of Fire country as Tsunade and Shizune and had no opportunity or motivation to go check up on Sasuke.

After it got dark, Sakura went to Naruto's apartment building and found him sitting on the roof.

Naruto didn't greet her when she sat down a meter away. He didn't even look her way. He was staring out at the sky, arms folded on his knees and one foot tapping in a restless but constant rhythm.

Sakura had only seen him like this once before--three months ago, in the two days between when Naruto claimed that Sasuke had been in the forest and when the Sound attacked. She stayed quiet. Naruto continued to glare at the appearing stars.

Eventually, Sakura shifted her head to the side and whispered so that Oukei, sitting on the roof of the opposite building, wouldn't oversee or hear. "We better go inside somewhere--this doesn't look good. We need to think of what to say tomorr--"

"He's back," Naruto interrupted. When Sakura looked at him, he explained: "He's been back since late afternoon. He's way out past the walls. But he's figured out how far I can smell, so he moved away almost as soon as I noticed." Naruto's foot started tapping a fraction faster, and Sakura shifted to the side. "And I can't go looking, 'cause the hag said she's gonna quarantine me to the tower if I run from the anbu anymore, and I can't let him come with me because there was blood."

"What?" Sakura said, moving so she was kneeling. "Is he--"

"It's not all his," Naruto said shortly. "But I can't tell how much is; he's all tangled up with that damn snake sten--"

Naruto's voice and foot stopped at the same time. He rolled forward into a crouch, and sniffed the air.

Then he tore off the roof and across the nearby buildings.

Sakura swore to herself. Naruto was out of sight before she could get on her feet and chase after him.

—

When she landed on the walkway outside Sasuke's apartment, panting for breath and legs aching from the sudden amount of chakra she'd forced into them, Naruto was already bashing on Sasuke's door.

Sasuke opened it a few seconds later, catching Naruto's fist before it could hit him instead of the door. "Don't annoy my neighbors, dumbass."

Naruto glanced at the bright red slash along Sasuke's jawline before glaring at his eyes. "You reek of snakes."

"Better than smelling like pond scum."

Sakura shoved Naruto in the back, forcing both of them into the apartment. Once the door was shut and locked behind her, she let herself sink to the floor.

Less than a moment later, there was an audible thump on the roof as Oukei landed there in a fashion meant to inform them he was annoyed. Sasuke and Sakura looked up. Naruto ignored it and kept glaring at Sasuke.

After snorting, Sasuke pushed away from the other teenager and moved to the kitchenette. He filled a glass with water before handing it to Sakura.

"Thanks," she mumbled before draining it. Sasuke didn't reply and walked into the bathroom, still ignoring Naruto's glare. Naruto took it upon himself to follow.

Sasuke returned a few seconds later, carrying a full knapsack. Naruto had another one, and he was giving it a confused look.

"What the hell's this crap?" he demanded.

Sasuke crouched beside Sakura and opened the sack, turning it upside down. More than a dozen scrolls slid out.

"This is everything I found in the library that dealt with chakra. I checked for traps, and they're all clean." He fished in the pile for a moment, then brought up a medium-sized scroll tied with a delicate silver cord. Sasuke held it out to her. "This has more description on what the Fourth did. It's a copy, so I don't know if you can trust it, and it doesn't have all of the procedure, but it's got a lot of information on the fox demon. I didn't remember it until yesterday."

Sakura set the glass down carefully and took the scroll from his hand as though she were waiting for the illusion to melt.

Sasuke pulled the second bag from Naruto's arms. "This is just stuff from Kabuto's office. I can't read it--I don't know if he's using some medicnin shorthand--so I took what looked important." He set it down beside the pile.

Sakura cradled the scroll in her lap and wondered vaguely if the second bag was an apology for yesterday. "You . . . this is from . . . **how**?"

Sasuke sat back and folded his legs. "I told them I was Orochimaru."

Dead silence.

". . . _Shit_, Sasuke." Naruto sat down on the floor.

Sakura gave the still-healing cut on Sasuke's neck a look. "And they believed it?"

Sasuke absently pressed a thumb to the skin below the scab. "For long enough."

(Sasuke had gotten that wound because he'd been half a kilometer outside of Oto's walls when he turned around, went back to the main building, and started freeing the people who were still locked in the experiment cells. One of them who'd overheard Sasuke talking in Orochimaru's voice had attempted to slit his throat from behind while he was remembering a particular cell's code. Sasuke had thrown him back, but then two more attacked, and the noise brought the attention of the ninjas he'd tricked into thinking he was elsewhere while he escaped.

The majority of people with curse seals were either dead or had run off when Orochimaru and Kabuto and the others didn't return, and there were none left who could activate the second level; so Sasuke wasn't out-powered, just outmanned. He managed to leave without killing too many people, and once he reached the forest he summoned Kyomamushi and two more vipers to stop anyone from following him.)

He didn't feel the need to tell Naruto and Sakura any of that, so he just said, "It wasn't hard to get in and out. With all the fighting, all that's left in the village is the trash, bickering over who should take control and tearing themselves apart. Idiots," he added with a sneer.

"Idi**ot**!" Sakura retorted. "I can't believe you--what if they called your bluff! It's been a _month!_"

"A month is a reasonable amount of time, Sakura-chan," Sasuke replied. "I would have to wait that long to convince Tsunade-hime and Kakashi that everything was normal. But there wouldn't be any trouble, especially since I have Naruto and Sakura-chan on my side to defend me. And a month would give me plenty of time to collect information from Anko-chan before leaving."

Sakura stared at him. The corner of Sasuke's mouth curled up in a smirk.

_It would have worked. It would have **worked**_, she realized. _We didn't even _think_--and if anyone had pushed it, I wouldn't have listened; I would have thought it was just the same old thing again_. . . .

Naruto kicked Sasuke in the thigh.

"Don't try to scare us. We would've known if you weren't you."

While Sasuke glared at him, Naruto added with utter conviction: "Orochimaru could never master _your_ kind of assholeness."

Sasuke blinked once, and finally gave him a disbelieving look. "That's not a word."

"That's not the point!"

Sakura let out her breath heavily. "Don't **ever** do that again. Geez, Sasuke, I can't believe. . . ." She shook her head. "Seriously, never do that. You picked the worst time. . . ."

"Why?" he asked, looking back to her.

Sakura shifted to a more comfortable sitting position, still cradling the scroll. "The Lord of Fire country has been in meetings with Tsunade-sensei and the clan heads and others for the last few days. He's angry that another war started between the hidden villages in less than two decades, especially since we're supposed to be the one keeping the peace."

She shrugged a shoulder. "It's not like he could do anything while the war or the cleanup with the Mist was going on, but now he's raising hell and threatening to cut Konoha's funding." Sakura gave him a pointed look. "It would be really bad to irritate Tsunade-sensei right now. _Really_ bad. **I** wouldn't even dare it."

Sasuke nodded briefly.

After a few moments of silence, Sakura looked back at the scroll. She started to untie the cord when Naruto said quietly, "Hey."

They looked over at him, but he was staring at Sakura. "Why did you need information on the fox demon?"

Sakura glanced down at the scroll. She smoothed out the cord, then took a breath and looked up at him.

"Naruto . . . do you want to go back to the way you were?"

—

When she finished explaining everything, including her research and a little bit about the surgery's procedure, Naruto said "No."

Sakura had moved to the chair while talking, and she looked down at him, startled. "Huh?"

Naruto glared up at her from where he was hunched over. "This is one of those 'power of human sacrifice' things, isn't it," he said flatly. "No. No _way_."

Sakura hesitated. Then she chuckled faintly and leaned on the chair's arm. "Yeah. It is."

Before Naruto could say anything, she continued. "Or it would be, if I were crazy enough to try and do it all on my own." She made a face at Naruto. "But you're too annoying to die for. Sasuke is going to seal the area that's too difficult, so all I have to do is separate the chakra strands. And I won't even have to be checking for each individual spot--Hinata-chan is going to do that."

"You talked to Sasuke **and** Hinata before me?"

She nodded. "I had to make sure this was possible before saying anything. Otherwise, to say something that would give hope and then take it back. . . ." She paused. "And you'll keep the fox demon from trying to attack me, right?"

"Yes," Naruto replied without hesitation.

Sakura smiled. "Then, with everything split up, we'll be okay. It won't be easy, but we can do it."

Naruto looked at Sasuke, who shrugged, and then looked at the scab along his jaw. He glanced at the scrolls that were still heaped on the floor before gazing back up at Sakura. "You promise it's safe? Like that?"

"I don't lie to you guys," she replied.

". . . okay," Naruto finally said.

—

Sakura had wanted to read the scroll then, but she knew after the way they'd shown up at Sasuke's apartment, if they stayed too long Oukei would become suspicious. She healed Sasuke's throat from a fresh cut to an old scar, and then the two of them left.

She came over late the next day, after a six-hour round in the hospital where she was filling in for Shizune again because, as she informed Sasuke, the Lord of Fire country was being an ass and **not** appreciating the fact that Konoha had kept the civilian casualties to almost non-existent, which was a _lot_ better than the last war.

"What?" she said when Sasuke just stared at her. "Didn't you guys have that problem?"

"The Lord of Sound country was a spy for Oto," Sasuke replied.

". . . Lucky." Sakura dropped the subject with that and dived into the scrolls. She only took a break when Sasuke went out and brought Lee back before making dinner for both of them.

Sasuke found it vaguely annoying that after going through all the trouble of getting his own apartment again, he still wasn't alone. And now it was no longer possible to walk across the floor without stepping on unrolled scrolls. He once walked along the wall to make a point, but Sakura just blithely thanked him for not disturbing her notes.

But at least it only lasted for five days, and Sakura didn't stay overnight so she couldn't hear if he started talking in his sleep. This meant it was still better than Kakashi's apartment.

Ino showed up at his apartment the morning of the third day, forced a wrapped boxed lunch into his hands, and gave him a surprisingly threatening look as she told him to make sure Sakura ate because she looked too damn pale lately and the doctors at the hospital had noticed.

"People will start talking if you're here all the time," he mentioned that afternoon when Sakura stopped by during her lunch break.

She didn't look up from the scroll. "If they think I would betray Lee, they're too stupid for me to care about."

Sasuke made a noncommittal noise and continued sharpening the edge of the kunai he was holding. He made Sakura take the bento with her when she left.

On the last day, when Sasuke returned from sparring with Naruto, Sakura was staring down at the scroll and resting her temples in her palms. When he had washed up and cooked dinner and set a bowl of rice in front of her, she was still sitting that way.

"What is it?"

"Something's wrong," Sakura said, still staring at the scroll. "I was mostly right about what the Fourth did, except . . . it doesn't make sense. This drains less chakra than I calculated."

Sasuke frowned. "Isn't that good?"

"Yes . . . but. . . ." She shook her head and folded her arms on the table. "I don't understand. I thought the reason the fox was sealed into Naruto was because there was no choice . . . but if the Fourth was as powerful as everyone says, he should have been able to kill the demon completely. That man's footnote about some death god jutsu. . . ."

She trailed off. Sasuke's frown deepened. "What's the problem?"

"I just . . . I can't make it make sense." Sakura hesitated for another moment. "It's like. . . ."

Then she stopped herself and let out a breath. She rolled the scroll up. "Okay. I know what happened. And, it's sentient--so you need to use one of the other two seals."

He nodded once. Sakura stood.

"I have to get a hold of Hinata-chan. I'll explain everything fully when all five of us meet, and then we can do it."

"Five?"

"Lee's going to be our alibi for that day. This will take a couple hours, at the least."

Sasuke made another motion of acknowledgement. Sakura picked up the cooling bowl of rice and opened one of Kabuto's scrolls.

"Whoa," she said a minute later. "Are these all like this?"

Sasuke looked over. "Yeah. Is it not shorthand?"

"Not any I know," she said. "It doesn't even look like code." She unrolled it further and set it on the table. "See, some things are written normally, like here," she indicated, "but others are . . . geez, it's like he only wrote one character to denote a whole phrase. And then blurred the lines into each other just be annoying. Did he secretly hate Orochimaru or something?" she added in a half joke.

"Of course," Sasuke replied. "We all hated him."

Sakura paused at that, but she didn't look up from the scroll. ". . . Then. . . ? Ah, no." She took a bite of rice. "It's not important."

"So they're useless?" he said, indicating the rest of the knapsack with an elbow.

She shook her head. "No. Just a challenge."

Sasuke snorted faintly, and they finished the meal in silence.

——

Sakura managed to contact Hinata that evening, and worked everything out so that the five of them would meet at Sasuke's apartment two nights later.

But Hinata was late; it was thirty minutes past the arranged time when Sakura finally started describing the process that the Fourth had used to seal the fox demon into Naruto.

"The problem is that there's a chunk missing from the middle," she explained. "There's a note that's added at the end, about a jutsu that makes a pact with a death god and grants the user the power for one act in exchange for something . . . his life, I guess, since it's a death god . . . but however it was used isn't described. I guess it was so forbidden it can't even be written down. Or the Fourth invented it."

"Or there wasn't time to write it down," Sasuke said. "If the payment is life."

"Yeah," Sakura agreed, "but someone else must have known, or this wouldn't be here. I think it's Orochimaru's own note, not part of the original scroll. And there's no mention where he learned it from."

Naruto wiped his palms on his pants. "Wait, you mean the Fourth used some life-eating jutsu to, to . . . to what?"

"He managed to hold the fox demon long enough to . . ." Sakura made a hand motion that shifted into the first seal of the Eight Divination Sealing Style, "to, like . . . liquefy it. Or transmute it into pure chakra. That was the first step. The rest of the seals look like they were the way to harness it so it could be moved."

Naruto pointed to his chest. "And then he shoved it into me."

Sakura nodded.

". . . Glad he came from our village," Naruto said after a long pause.

"No kidding," Sakura replied. She leaned back in the chair. "That's why you've got that kind of stamina--when it was sealed into you, some of the chakra must have fused with yours immediately. There couldn't have been enough room for both."

There was a tap at the door, and Sasuke let Hinata in.

She gave everyone a quick, apologetic nod before pushing a bit of hair back underneath the protector tied around her forehead. "I'm sorry for being late. I had trouble getting here unseen."

Sakura stood up and motioned Hinata to the lone chair in the room. "Did Kurenai-san not want you to go out?" she asked, sitting down next to Lee.

"Ah, no," Hinata said quietly. "I moved back to the . . . to my family's house, recently."

Sasuke's head lifted slightly before he stopped himself. Naruto noticed, and looked at Hinata carefully.

"I said I was going to go shopping," she explained, "but Neji-niisan came with me, so I'm not sure how long I'll be able to stay here. I'm very sorry."

Sakura shook her head. "It's not your fault. Okay. Well, everyone knows their part, and I've told the guys what you would be doing . . . Sasuke is going to seal away that problematic area around Naruto's stomach that you pointed out."

"Okay," Hinata said with a nod, glancing over at him. Sasuke didn't look at her.

"Lee's going to be our alibi," Sakura continued. "I think . . . when we find a day that we all have free and that we won't have to use any chakra beforehand, we can say we're going to train together. That way we'll have an excuse to be moving while it's still dawn."

"What about the anbu guard?" Sasuke said.

"I'll take care of it," Sakura said. "It would be better to confuse him with clones of ourselves, but I really don't want to waste any chakra. I'll drug him for several hours."

"I'll make sure that no one notices him, or comes nearby," Lee said. "But the problem is that Sakura plans--"

"Don't start it again, Lee, please," she interrupted. "There's no other option."

"But if something--"

Naruto shoved himself onto his feet, strode across the room, and yanked Hinata's forehead protector off. She gave a startled cry, pressing her hands to her head.

Sakura and Lee stood up. "Naruto!" she snapped. "What the. . . ."

And then her words died in her throat, because the ugly black of the curse seal was visible through Hinata's splayed fingers.

Naruto's grip around the forehead protector was so tight that the metal was threatening to bend, and he was shaking. "When . . . who did . . . why didn't you **say** anything!"

Sakura stepped forward and set a hand on his arm. "Naruto--"

He shoved her away without taking his eyes off Hinata. Sakura stumbled back, and Lee caught her.

When Lee noticed that her arm was bleeding where Naruto's claws had slashed it, he pulled her and himself back before stepping in front. Sasuke had already rolled onto the balls of his feet and shifted his eyes to the sharingan. Sakura mouthed 'don't panic' to Hinata.

Hinata was staring directly at Naruto, but she still saw the other teenager's motions.

"Which one of them did it?" Naruto growled.

". . . Are you going to hurt my family, Naruto-kun?" she asked quietly.

He clenched the forehead protector tighter. "How can . . . can you call that _family?_"

". . . I . . . I was given the chance to improve, Naruto-kun," she said. "My father gave me years to become worthy of being clan heir. I tried my very best. . . . But Hanabi-sama is stronger than me. She was born that way."

Naruto was still staring at her, but some of the anger had been replaced now. Hinata said "It had to be one of us," and held out her hand for the forehead protector.

Her voice had been even enough, but her hand was trembling.

Naruto stared at her hand. He looked over at Lee, who was still standing between him and Sakura, and at Sakura, who had blood running down her arm. Then he glanced toward Sasuke, who was looking at his stomach with a carefully blank expression.

Naruto shuddered and pushed the forehead protector into her hand. He backed away until he hit the opposite wall, and sank to the ground, wrapping his arms over his stomach and folding in on himself.

It was quiet.

After half a minute, Sakura sat down carefully. Lee crouched, keeping his position between her and Naruto. Hinata was still trying to tie her forehead protector with shaking fingers.

After Sasuke let his eyes bleed back to black, and Hinata managed to make a passable knot, Sakura let her breath out quietly. ". . . Naruto?"

"Yeah," he muttered.

"Is . . . everything. . . ?"

"He wants what's _mine_," Naruto hissed, curling in a little tighter.

Sakura bit her lip.

Another two minutes passed before Naruto finally let his legs splay out in front of him. He looked at Hinata. "I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry. I didn't . . . I. . . ."

She shook her head slightly. "It's okay."

"It's **not** okay!"

"It happened," Hinata said. "There's nothing to be done."

"There's gotta be--isn't there _some_ way to fix it?" He looked from her to Sakura.

"Curse seals can't be removed," Sasuke replied. "Not without killing the bearer."

". . . Yes." Hinata looked down at her hands.

Naruto swore. He pulled a leg back up and rested his arm on it, before swearing more. Then he banged a fist against the floor.

Sasuke gave him a look. "Don't irritate my neighbors, dammit--the landlord wants an excuse to get rid of me."

Another long, uncomfortable silence filled the room, and finally Sasuke looked at Sakura. "What are you trying to do that Lee's so against?"

Lee started to speak, but Sakura held up a hand. "No." She glanced at the teenager hunched against the wall. "Naruto, you need to leave."

He gave her a half-confused, half-hurt look. Sakura smiled gently. "I'm sorry, this is all my fault. I didn't think . . . we've been discussing how to re-trap the fox demon while it's been able to hear. That's like deciding how to attack a village while the Kage is listening. It's better if. . . ." She paused, then asked, "Will you trust me?"

He nodded.

"Okay. . . ." She nodded as well. "Lee, you know everything, so . . . can you go back with him?"

Lee nodded, but said, "Sakura, please think about the consequences if. . . ."

He trailed off as she shook her head, and turned to Naruto.

When the two of them were gone, Sakura leaned against the table and exhaled heavily. Then she went to the kitchen sink and started washing off her arm. Sasuke walked to the bathroom.

Hinata handed her a towel, and Sakura had a hard time even looking at her sideways. "Hinata-chan . . . I'm so sorry to hear about. . . ."

Hinata shook her head. "It's okay."

"No it's **not**!" Sakura insisted. "It's not **fair**, why--how can you just **say** that?"

Hinata looked directly at her. "How is it fair to force someone inherently talented to a life in the branch house, just because she was born second? Why should Hanabi-sama have to be another Neji-niisan?"

Sakura didn't have a reply to that. She turned the towel over.

Hinata looked down as well. "I. . . . Please don't tell Naruto-kun this, but everyone knew it was going to happen. Hanabi-sama didn't receive the curse seal at four, like she was supposed to. I meant it when I said my father gave me every chance. . . . Hanabi-sama will be a better clan heir than I could be."

Before Sakura could think of what to say in reply, Sasuke dropped the first-aid kit he'd retrieved onto the table.

"Don't defend that barbaric practice in my house," he told Hinata before disappearing into the bathroom again and shutting the door.

"Sasuke!" Sakura called, but Hinata only shook her head again. Sakura gave her a frustrated look. "Don't let him get away with that!"

". . . One of the founders of the Uchiha clan came from the Hyuuga branch house," Hinata told her in a very quiet whisper. When Sakura blinked, she added: "And, we were in the same class at the Academy, so. . . ."

. . . _Ah_, Sakura realized a few moments later. _It was probably indoctrinated in him while his parents were still alive_.

She checked if the bleeding had stopped. It hadn't. "Still. . . ."

"Have you been by the police station lately, Sakura-chan?" Hinata reminded her.

Sakura fell silent.

When the Uchiha clan was slaughtered, the police force lost almost three-fourths of their men. Several clans had been drawn from to fill in the empty slots, but over time it was the Hyuugas who had taken over. Sakura and Naruto were the first to notice when the Uchiha fan disappeared from the police crest, a month after Sasuke left.

When the bleeding was mostly done, Sakura left the towel on the counter before sitting down and beginning to dab disinfectant on her arm. Hinata sat next to her and touched the tabletop.

"Did this come from the Uchiha compound?" she asked.

"Yeah," Sakura said, and Hinata nodded briefly.

When she was finished with the disinfectant, Sakura called, "Sasuke, will you bring me some tape?"

A cabinet rattled in the quiet, and then Sasuke returned. He gave her arm a look as he set the tape down. "How deep was it?"

"Not that much," she replied, beginning to wrap the bandage around her arm, "but I always leave the scars when he does this. It's a good reminder."

Sasuke frowned. "It's happened before?"

"Once in a while. . . . He forgets he has claws." She tore the edge of the bandage free, and Hinata handed her a piece of tape. "It's the first time he hasn't apologized, though," she commented quietly as she taped the edge down.

"Hn," was all Sasuke replied.

"I have an overnight mission the day after tomorrow," Sakura told them, resting her arm on the table. "And I need a full day to rest up after that. But the next day . . . Thursday, can you both make that day free? And the one before it--don't expend any chakra."

They both nodded.

"Good," Sakura murmured, trying not to look at either her arm or the first-aid kit.

Hinata packed the bandages and the disinfectant back into the container. She set the tape on the lid before holding it out to Sasuke.

"This is a good table you have," she told him. "It doesn't scar easily."

Sasuke stared at her for a moment before taking the kit. "I've heard the Hyuuga clan has excellent tables as well."

"I suppose so," Hinata replied. "They all come from the same wood."

"That's what makes the quality of the varnish important."

"Maybe. . . . But it's not the varnish that resists scarring."

"True," Sasuke acknowledged after a long pause. He took the kit back to the bathroom.

". . . Was that was an apology?" Sakura whispered to Hinata. When the other teenager nodded faintly, she said, "Okay."

Things were peaceful for all of the twenty-eight seconds it took Sasuke to put the kit away, come back, and ask again what Lee had been so concerned about.

Under the combined power of Sasuke and Hinata's patient staring, Sakura finally told them that the surgery was going to be performed far from Konoha. They reacted in the same way as Lee had.

"There's not an _option_, okay?" Sakura replied. "Are we supposed to sneak back into the village after going to all the work to get out? And if something . . . if something goes wrong, we **can't** be in the middle of here."

"But, even so . . . Sakura-chan. . . ."

"You said you can do it, didn't you?" Sasuke asked. "We trust your judgment. We can find a way back in without being seen."

"But if--"

"If something **does** go wrong, it'll kill us first, so who cares after that? I'll find a seal that will act as a warning to everyone else." He glared at her. "It's a stupid risk, and if--"

There was a knock at the door. Sasuke exhaled in irritation and started to stand up, but then Sakura said, "Lee doesn't knock like that."

He paused. Hinata looked at the door and activated her byakugan.

". . . oh!" She bit her lip. "It's Neji-niisan, I have to. . . ."

Sasuke picked up the scroll and the notes and pushed them at Sakura. She fled into the bathroom.

_That's no use if he already looked through the walls to find Hinata_, Sasuke thought, but he just looked at the other teenager.

"Can he read lips?" he asked her.

Hinata made a nervous head motion and continued strapping on her shoes. "Neji-niisan doesn't tell people what he can do."

"Keh." Sasuke opened the door.

Neji gave him the barest possible version of a greeting before looking at Hinata. "Are you done shopping?" he asked her, holding up a sack.

"Ah! Um, yes, thank you." She nodded to Sasuke. "Goodbye, Sasuke-kun, and . . . ah, goodbye."

Sasuke closed the door behind them, and Sakura returned to the room sans scrolls.

"Crap," she muttered. "Were we saying incriminating things or just suspicious ones?"

"We'll know by tomorrow whether he can or not," Sasuke said. "Or whether he feels he owes more to Konoha or Naruto."

"I guess so. . . . I'll ask Lee if he knows."

"If you try to perform the surgery away from the village, I won't help you."

Sakura gave him a cold glare. "Don't joke."

"I'm not." Sasuke matched her glare and folded his arms. "You're not going to be 'exhausted' by the end of this; you're going to be half-dead, even with our help. What if we can't get you back to the hospital in time? What do you think Naruto will do if he learns you died after we promised it was safe?"

Sakura looked away.

Finally, she sat down in the chair. "But we'll be putting the whole village at risk. . . ."

"Lee and Hinata and I have already accepted that possibility. If you can't. . . ." He shrugged. "Then, if you notice something **is** wrong, tell me and I'll kill him before the fox demon takes over."

The previous glare was warm compared to this one. "That's unacceptable," Sakura bit off.

"Then don't fail." He leaned against the wall. "If you don't fail, we can stay in the village without risk, and then everything may turn out all right."

Sakura muttered something derogatory about Sasuke's parentage, but she eventually agreed to change the plan. She would perform the surgery in the small medic room of the Hokage tower, so they would be able to get Tsunade quickly.

Lee was delighted to hear the news when he returned. He also didn't know whether Neji could read lips.

—

Sasuke spent the next day searching through the almost-abandoned Nakano shrine, looking for paper that was suitable to make ofuda from. He summoned Kyomamushi to make sure no one entered while he was running through the processes he remembered to purify the paper.

Two hours later, when Sasuke determined that he had remembered everything in the proper order and was finished, he called the snake back inside.

"Do those feel holy to you?" he asked as he cleaned up the fire, and pointed at the small pile of ofuda over his shoulder.

Kyomamushi made the noise that Sasuke had come to recognize as laughter before slithering over to the seventh tatami mat on the far right. "They won't stop a demon," it said, "but they're good enough to buy peace of mind."

Sasuke nodded without replying. He cleaned away the last of the ashes and made a note to come by some day to fully sweep the place out.

Kyomamushi curled around enough to rest his head on his body, and waited patiently for Sasuke to turn around.

When he did, the teenager didn't recognize the spot for a moment. The snake could tell when he caught on, because Sasuke froze and then glared. Kyomamushi stared back at him with one eye.

"You knew," Sasuke finally said. "You knew even before I told you."

"The Uchiha clan is fairly old," the viper replied. "You aren't the only one to sign the contract." It shifted enough to slide its head onto the mat, but continued staring at Sasuke. "You are the first one to stay relatively sane after learning that particular truth," it added.

Sasuke stayed still for several moments, before turning around.

"There were others who knew," he said finally. "I think my father knew, because Itachi wasn't really welcome in most of our kin's homes, so he must have learned through ours." Sasuke realized his words were stumbling, and stayed quiet for a moment. He absently dusted the shrine with a palm. "And he was sane."

"I didn't make myself clear," the snake replied. "You were the first with the potential to _gain_ it that stayed sane."

". . . Hn," was all Sasuke said.

When he picked up the ofuda and began packing them away, Kyomamushi curled around itself once more. "You need a coat," it told him. "It's getting cold."

"I'm fine," he replied. "If I wrap my arms, and wear layers, I'll be fine until winter comes."

"And if they're not giving you paid missions by then?"

"Then I'll think of something," Sasuke said with an edge in his voice. "You don't need to be concerned."

The viper considered mentioning that at least Orochimaru had taken good care of Sasuke's body while trying to break down his mind, but decided it would be unnecessary. Instead, he shifted his head to stare at Sasuke with both eyes.

"You should let the fox die," Kyomamushi said. "I told you, you'll never be able to use the mangekyou healthily while you know he's alive."

"I am aware of your advice," Sasuke replied, closing his kit.

The viper stared at him for several seconds. Finally it flicked its tongue out briefly.

"You humans," Kyomamushi said, before uncurling. "I'm going back."

"Thank you for your work," he said.

"Anytime, Sasuke," the snake told him. "Try not to get killed," it added as it disappeared.


	15. ripple 15: Sakura redux

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs Masashi Kishimoto. The quotes belong to James, a comic strip that didn't get enough attention while it ran.  
——————

**-'**

_Love is a chaotic crack in the armor._

**-'**

Late Wednesday evening, Sakura said good-bye to Ino and her parents and walked over to Lee's apartment.

"Sakura!" he said with a smile when he opened the door. Then he remembered the time. "Wait . . . what about your curfew?"

She grinned up at him as she unfastened her boots. "I ate dinner with Ino-chan--my parents think I'm sleeping over at her house."

Lee nodded. Sakura's grin faltered a little.

"Hey," she said, propping a hand on her hip as she stepped into the living room. "This is the part where you're supposed to chide me for lying to them."

"Ah," Lee said, answering her with a similar smile. "Yes."

Sakura glanced at the floor for a moment. Then she exhaled and looked back up, tilting her head. "Did the water all boil out yet?"

"Just about," he replied, moving toward the kitchen.  
-

Lee completed his daily set of calisthenics while Sakura drained the leaves she'd been boiling and ground them up.

"I never realized how much I'm used to chakra until today," she said as she applied the paste to three acupuncture needles. "The fact that you can match people's jumps with muscle alone is even cooler now."

Lee finished the last set of push ups and wiped his forehead. Then he gave her a thumbs up. "It's because I believed in myself that the hard work was effective!"

Sakura nodded.

When she was done with the needles, she began writing out the scrolls for tomorrow. Lee helped her drape them around the floor and furniture so the ink could dry without running.  
-

Sakura couldn't afford to lose any energy from sex, due to the surgery. Lee couldn't either, because if the drug wore off before he got word that the procedure was over, he would be fighting to keep the anbu member from returning to the village and potentially disrupting everything.

Even though he knew they both needed solid rest, Lee stayed awake long after Sakura had fallen asleep, spooned against him, and cradled her hands in his.  
-

When the alarm went off Thursday morning, Sakura could already smell Lee cooking breakfast.

"Ooooh!" She clapped her hands when she saw that he'd cooked her favorite kind of dumplings. "You're spoiling me!"

"Not at all!" he retorted with a grin, ladling the food onto the plates.  
-

They walked out of the apartment holding hands.

—

The five met an hour before dawn at Konoha's gates. Hinata informed Sakura that she had had to use an illusion to get out, but the other teenager told her it was okay; and then Naruto arrived, anbu trailing behind him.

Oukei shoved his mask up and gave them an amused look. "I've never heard of trying to have a five-way spar before," he said as they walked out. "Let alone in the dark."

"Well, we've all got things we have to do later," Sakura explained. "This was the only free time we could find."

"You're weird kids," Oukei replied.

That was the last time she spoke directly to him, until dawn was breaking over the trees and they had walked a few kilometers away from Konoha.

Sakura stopped abruptly, and a moment later Lee moved away from her. Naruto cut off the story he'd been telling Hinata.

"Oukei-san."

When he stepped up to the group, Sakura bowed slightly. "I wish someone else had drawn your duty for today, but please forgive us."

Oukei started to frown, and then Lee kicked him in the side of the head.

When he was thrown to his knees from the force of the blow, Sakura pulled one of the needles from her pouch and jammed it into his neck. He collapsed.

"Sakura-chan! Shit, you didn't kill him, did you?" Naruto darted forward and bent next Oukei.

She was staring down at the man. "That was too . . . he didn't have his guard up at _all_."

"He trusted us too much," Sasuke replied, letting his eyes slip back out of the sharingan. "An anbu should know better."

"Lay off," Naruto snapped at him. He looked back at Sakura. "He'll be okay, right?"

"Yeah," she said. "I didn't push it far enough in for even a momentary death. He'll be up in several hours."

After Sakura kissed Lee goodbye, he dragged Oukei off. Since Sakura had found an excuse to take Hinata to the room at the tower yesterday so she would have the coordinates, the four of them quickly made their way back toward Konoha until they were close enough to just teleport into it. Sasuke hooked an arm through Sakura's and took her with him so she wouldn't have to waste any chakra.

—

He and Sakura arrived in the room first. Sasuke unhooked his arm from hers and said, "If it goes wrong, you know Lee will come back."

"Let me pretend, Sasuke," she replied, and then Naruto poofed in.

When Hinata arrived, Sasuke pulled five ofuda out of his pack, cut his finger, and began writing on them.

Hinata gave Naruto a startled look. "I . . . thought you couldn't do precise jutsus anymore, Naruto-kun."

"Eheh." Naruto sat down on one of the beds. "It's kind of a long story."

Sasuke slapped one of the ofuda over the door and the frame, and pressed his hands together. "On . . . abokya beiroshanam," he chanted slowly as he recalled the words.

Sakura had recognized the small, handleless blade that Sasuke used to cut his fingers from the first time she had dealt with Soundnins. She pursed her lips and said nothing, though; and a moment later she raised both eyebrows and stared at the ofuda. "Where did you learn onmyoujutsu?"

"Tayuya came from a clan of onmyouji," Sasuke replied in a tone that told Sakura that explained everything, even though to her it explained nothing. Naruto shifted on the bed.

"I don't have that kind of spiritual power," he told her in a lower voice. "This won't stop it. It _might_ slow it down, for a second."

"I can't fail, then," she said with a half-smile.

Sasuke used more ofuda to set up another barrier around the cot, sealing the four of them inside. Sakura collapsed the legs of the cot so it was on the floor, before arranging the scrolls she'd been carrying around it and telling Naruto to remove his jacket and pants. She sat on one side, while Hinata settled on the other. Sasuke stayed near the foot of the bed on Sakura's side.

Sakura folded her hands in her lap. "I'm really sorry, Naruto, but I don't know if this is going to hurt. But I can't give you any anesthesia, because you **have** to stay awake. If it gets even a chance to take over. . . ."

"Yeah," Naruto said. "I know. It's been. . . ." He gave her a thumbs up. "I won't let it take control. No matter what."

Sakura nodded once before staring down at her lap. She closed her eyes.

Almost half a minute ticked by while she stayed like that. Hinata eventually glanced over at Sasuke. He shifted to a more comfortable sitting position.

Sakura abruptly looked up. The she slammed a fist into her palm and grinned. "Hell yeah! Let's go!"

—

Sakura worked on the hardest part first, separating the fox demon's chakra from Naruto's in the area around his torso and hips. All Sasuke could see was the glow that the chakra gave above Naruto's skin, as Sakura made small motions with her fingers at the places Hinata pointed to; but that one area took almost the whole first hour, so he didn't let the easy appearance fool him.

By the second hour, Hinata was showing signs of a headache and the coils of the byakugan were straining further against her skin than they had at the beginning. She had taken a small yellow pill, drunk all the water in her canteen, and was currently nursing Naruto's. Sakura had been wiping sweat away from her forehead with her arm until Naruto tore up part of the bed's sheet and gave it to her.

By the third hour, Sasuke and Hinata knew something was wrong. Naruto had closed his eyes long ago to better concentrate, though, so they didn't say anything.

Sakura was so pale that her skin was starting to take on a greenish tint, and she had been swaying slightly until Sasuke braced a hand on her shoulder.

Hinata tried only once. "Sakura-chan?"

"Where's the next strand?" Sakura had replied.

"But. . . ."

"Can you point it out to me?"

Hinata directed her to the location; and after hesitating for a moment, she slipped her hand beneath Naruto's.

Sasuke made sure that Sakura was braced against the bed frame, before pulling four more ofuda out of his bag and silently setting up another barrier.

Another twenty minutes passed, and Hinata said encouragingly, "There's only about a dozen left."

Naruto, eyes still closed, grinned. Sakura tried to nod, and Sasuke caught her when she almost fell forward.

She made another small motion above the skin of Naruto's right index finger, and then whispered to Sasuke, "Don't let Lee do anything stupid."

"He won't have a reason to," he replied.

"_Sasuke_."

He tensed at the strain in her voice. ". . . Okay. I will."

"Thanks," she murmured, and moved to Naruto's ring finger.

Hinata made a small pained noise, and Sasuke looked over just in time to see Naruto loosen his grip on her hand. He was staring at Sakura with horrified blue eyes.

Sasuke propped her against the bed again, and quickly burned away both of the barriers.

When Hinata pointed to the first knuckle of Naruto's pinky and said, "This is the last one," Sasuke jerked his head toward the door and snapped "Go!"

Sakura made one last finger motion over the area, and then braced her hands on the bed. She was still for just long enough for Sasuke and Naruto to think everything would be okay; and then she started to pitch forward.

Sasuke grabbed her arm and pulled her backwards. She collapsed against his legs.

When Naruto started to sit up, Sasuke shoved him back down.

"She's--!" Naruto started to yell, but he froze as he watched Sasuke slash halfway up his own forearm.

"We're not done," Sasuke said, dropping the blade and smearing the blood on his fingertips.

He rapidly drew the lines of the new seal around the original one. Then he ran through the hand seals, focusing solely on remembering their order and not on the fact that he couldn't feel Sakura breathing. Then he coated his palm with blood before pressing it directly over the nine-tailed fox demon's seal.

Enraged, the fox lashed out in the only way it could. Sasuke clenched his jaw as chakra began burning his hand.

_Fuck you_, he replied. _I'm an Uchiha, I'm used to fire. You have to be cold if you want to hurt me_.

He held his hand there, forcing himself to endure the pain. But after three seconds, strangely, the burning lessened slightly. Sasuke felt a wisp of something cooler, soothing, a chakra that was opposite that of the fox demon's.

Before he had the time to wonder what it was, the last of the blood on his palm had connected with the lines, forming a net and forcing the fox demon back. Sasuke ripped his hand away with a pained hiss.

Naruto shoved himself up. "Hinata!"

He jerked his head over to see her still standing beside the door, shaking. "S-sasuke-kun!"

He'd forgotten to take off the last barrier. Sasuke stumbled onto his feet and skidded to the door. "On kira . . . kirika--**shit**!"

They couldn't just break the door, and he could see the bloodstains from where Hinata had torn her fingernails trying to scrape the ofuda off . . . all he'd done was lock them--

"On kirikyara harara futaranbaswoha!" Sasuke yelled, slamming his palm over the paper. The ofuda burned away, and he threw the door open before tearing into the hallway.

——

Tsunade was mentally cursing the paperwork that had piled up during the meetings with the Lord of Fire country, when the door to her office slammed open and an anbu burst in.

"Hokage-sama! Uchiha is--"

He had to stop then, to duck the warning shurikan that Sasuke threw at his shoulder. The anbu member drew his sword and slid in front of Tsunade.

She stood up. "What are you--!"

"Sakura is dying," Sasuke snapped, barely looking at her with his sharingan eyes. "Come."

He turned and ran out.

_What the **hell**_, Tsunade thought, noticing his bleeding arm--but she followed.

She entered the hallway just in time to see Sasuke ducking beneath another anbu's attack as he kicked the man's legs out from beneath him.

"Stop!" Tsunade yelled when the man aimed several shurikan at Sasuke's retreating back. "Call everyone off! Clear the hall!"

When she reached the second floor, Hinata was in the hallway, surrounded by three anbu members.

"Hokage-sama!" she called, trying to move away from them. She pointed at the small medical room to the side. "Saku . . . Sakura-chan. . . ."

Tsunade slid into the room with remarkable skill considering she wore heels. She barely noticed Sasuke half-collapsed against a cabinet, because Naruto was giving Sakura CPR.

"**Help her**!" he yelled, shoving her body at Tsunade.

The woman took one look at Sakura before barking for the anbu to fetch Shizune.

—

For almost two minutes, Tsunade thought it was hopeless.

Sakura had just enough energy left in her body that it was possible for Tsunade to feed it with her own chakra long enough to get past the crisis point--but she couldn't do it when she was also trying to keep Sakura's lungs moving and understand what had happened at the same time.

The anbu brought Shizune in enough time, however. The younger woman immediately recognized the signs of chakra exhaustion, and set up a respirator and several scrolls to amplify Tsunade's work.

That would have freed Tsunade of enough strain to question Sasuke and Naruto, but the anbu had moved them into the hallway with Hinata by that point.

Naruto had redressed once Tsunade arrived, and she had been too focused on Sakura to recognize the changes made to the Fourth's seal.

——

Within seventeen minutes, Sakura was breathing on her own, and she was transferred to the better-equipped hospital.

Naruto, Hinata, and Naruto were taken over there as well, and one of the nurses put salve on Sasuke's hand before bandaging it and his arm. They sent a notice to the Hyuuga compound for one of the family medicnins to come and treat Hinata, but so far there had been no reply.

Sasuke had disappeared for two and a half minutes, and had sent four snakes out to find Lee, before joining Hinata and Naruto outside of the room Sakura was in. One of the doctors had tried to make them move out of the hallway, but Naruto had snarled at him. The man didn't recognize that the sound was only an imitation, and everyone proceeded to give him and Hinata a wide berth.

Naruto was slouched against the wall beside the door. Hinata was sitting on the ground beside him, resting her temple against the metal leg of a gurney. Sasuke started to sit down across from them, but he had barely bent his knees when Naruto grabbed his collar and slammed him against the wall.

"Why didn't you _tell me?_" he yelled. "You said it was **safe**!"

"We said it was dangerous," Sasuke replied, glaring at him. "That's why we made her stay here in the first place."

"You were watching!" Naruto slammed him against the wall again. "Why didn't you make her quit in the middle, dammit? She could have DIED!"

The gurney rattled as Hinata pulled herself onto her feet. "Naruto-kun, please . . . please, stop. There was no way to quit. She told us. . . ."

Naruto turned his head enough to see her. "The hell there wasn't! She should have stopped and rested for a day!"

Sasuke knocked Naruto's hand away with his good forearm. "And then the massively enraged fox demon would have taken over the second you stopped concentrating on holding it back and killed everyone. Do you have any idea how much she was counting on you to keep it in control, idiot?"

"Bullshit," Naruto replied, glaring at him. "If that were true, it could have killed you guys in there if I'd slipped."

Sasuke didn't reply. He stared over the blond's shoulder at the door.

After several long moments, punctuated by the unnatural silence in the hallway, Naruto took a step back. He looked at Hinata again.

She was leaning heavily against the gurney and the wall, but she managed to give him a small smile. "She warned us beforehand, what could happen if . . . that's why we had so much trouble convincing her to do the surgery here, close to the hospital."

"You guys. . . ." Naruto turned back to Sasuke. "You. . . . _Why?_ She and Lee . . . and you, you had Itachi to--"

Sasuke punched him in the jaw.

That was a bad idea, he reflected a moment later, as he cradled his bandaged hand to his chest.

"Stop asking stupid questions," he muttered, still refusing to look at the expression in Naruto's eyes.

—

When Lee arrived, the three of them were sitting silently in the hallway. Naruto had dragged two benches over from another hall, and he and Sasuke were sitting on one while Hinata lay on the other.

Tsunade had left the room long enough to tell them that Sakura was unconscious, that whether she had suffered any permanent damage from chakra exhaustion and not breathing would be revealed once she woke up, and that they were to refrain from speaking about anything from that morning in loud voices in public. Then she called for an IV and closed the door again. She wouldn't let them see Sakura.

Several people had been given orders to find Lee once his part was learned, but one of the snakes reached him first.

The security on the floor let Lee through once he handed the still-unconscious Oukei over to a medicnin. He strode awkwardly up to the three of them, favoring his left leg.

"She's okay," Naruto told him before Lee could even ask. "I mean, Tsunade's acting like she's gonna be okay. She said there could be problems, though, but we won't know 'til she wakes up. . . ."

Lee nodded and touched the door. "Can I see her?"

Naruto shook his head. "She hasn't let any of us in."

Lee let his hand fall. Then he sat down on the floor next to Hinata's bench, beside the door.

"Come here," Sasuke said harshly. Lee gave him a confused look, but then his leg jerked.

"Oh!" Lee said, before pushing down his leg warmer enough for a blacksnake to slide out. He started to hand it to Sasuke, but it moved away from his touch and slithered up to the hand Sasuke set near the floor. It tried to curl around his arm, but Sasuke braced his other hand against his elbow, blocking it.

"I didn't tell you to slow him down," he said flatly, lifting his arm.

The blacksnake draped itself heavily over his wrist and bit at the skin above his elbow. "It's **cold**," it replied. "And you made us go through this damn village first before even getting to the forest--people kept trying to step on me!"

"Things are different here," Sasuke said.

"But I _still_ brought him back," it finished, in a tone that indicated it had done him a huge favor. The snake pushed its head through the space between his bandaged thumb and index finger and slid partly through, before resting its head on his upper arm. Sasuke grit his teeth to keep from wincing. Naruto made a faint growling sound. "And I want hares," the blacksnake informed him. "Five of them. Hispid hares."

"There aren't any of those in this country," Sasuke told it.

The blacksnake casually wound its tail around his wrist. "Then think of something, genius."

_Asshole_, Sasuke thought at it. "Where are the others?"

"They went back when I found him."

"Fine." Sasuke attempted to extract his bandaged hand from the snake's grip. "That's all. Thank you, Martel-san."

The snake disappeared. Sasuke wiped away the blood from its bite with his wrist.

"Thank you for that, Sasuke-kun," Lee said after a brief silence.

The other teenager shrugged and didn't look up. "I was already bleeding."

—

Soon after Lee arrived, Tsunade called them all into the room.

She stopped Naruto when he was just barely over the threshold, and pressed her fingers to the scars on his cheek. Then she picked up his hand and examined his nails.

Then she stared. Naruto smiled uncomfortably.

"Shizune," she said, dropping his hand. "Go stand guard. I don't want anyone but you even _near_ this hall."

The younger woman nodded quickly and left, shutting the door behind her.

Tsunade looked at the four of them, carefully guarding her expression. "What the hell did you **do**?"

—

The first thing Sasuke did was exonerate Sakura and Naruto from the blame of performing something so dangerous in the middle of the village. When Hinata realized that he was wording his statements to make it look like he was at fault, she spoke up enough to state that she had also encouraged Sakura to stay in Konoha, and Lee said that he was the one who had told the two of them about the plan in the first place, so they would help him to convince her to remain. All three admitted that while Sakura had warned them of the extreme danger, she'd made them swear to keep it a secret from Naruto so that he would agree to the procedure in the first place. He hadn't known about the risk at all.

Then Tsunade said fine, she got the point, would they please move on.

When they were done explaining everything they knew, Tsunade examined Naruto's torso. The blood had already dried and seeped in, and the color had shifted to a tan that wasn't much darker than his skin. Tsunade stared at it for several moments, and then had Sasuke unwrap his hand.

She recognized the pattern of the chakra burn on his palm and fingers immediately, having seen it once before on the fourth Hokage's corpse. But there, the man had been burned on both hands, and it had been almost up to his shoulders rather than just to the base of his thumb.

"I removed all the information that matched what she was taking weeks ago," Tsunade said quietly, looking at Sasuke's palm rather than his face. "I'm not going to ask where you got the scroll Hinata mentioned. But I want it in my office before tomorrow. That's a dangerous thing to keep in public."

"Yes," he replied tonelessly. When Naruto started to say something, Sasuke shook his head once, sharply.

She straightened. "I'm not going to lecture you on how stupid and dangerous what you did is, because you all obviously know. Do not say a **word** about this to anyone else. In fact, I want all of you to remain in your homes until I find a way to explain what happened that won't cause riots. Don't leave unless you have to buy food. And Naruto, you head to the tower. I want you to spend the rest of the day and tonight with me, just in case."

They all nodded silently.

After that, Tsunade wrapped Sasuke's hand with fresh bandages and told them all to leave.

"Please let me stay, Hokage-sama," Lee replied.

He hadn't moved from the spot he had been in when he first entered the room: standing beside Sakura's bed and touching her fingers below the needle of the IV.

Tsunade studied him for a moment, and finally snorted. "I'm sure the anbu are going to want to know how you managed to take down one of their members. They'll be here for another twenty minutes."

Lee nodded. Tsunade waved at the rest of them. "You, go. Now."

—

When the door was closed behind them, Hinata gave Sasuke a worried look. "I'm sorry . . . Sakura-chan mentioned it to me, so I thought . . . I didn't mean to say anything that would cause you trouble."

Sasuke shrugged a shoulder faintly. "You didn't know."

Naruto walked past him, turning to the left and heading for the back stairs instead of the waiting room. Shizune had cordoned off the entire hallway, not even posting anbu members at the ends. They had to jump over a few tripwires that were only visible to those leaving rather than entering.

As Naruto pushed a gurney that was blocking the way against the wall, he glanced back at Sakura's door.

"I'm not gonna let her down," he said quietly.

"What?" Sasuke asked, taking the opportunity to change the subject.

Naruto didn't reply immediately. Once they got to the stairs, though, he said, "I don't want to be Hokage anymore just to make people acknowledge my existence." He pushed open the door. "Hell, they're al_ready_ doing that."

Sasuke glanced over. Naruto was almost smiling.

"And I don't really want to be Hokage to protect the village," he added, as the door closed behind them. He started down the stairs. "I don't really **like** half the people here anymore. They break my stuff, they harass Sakura-chan and Lee . . . Iruka-sensei gets all the troublemakers in his classes. Some people are even assholes to Kakashi-sensei, just because you were his favorite." He looked at Sasuke. "Did you know that first week you came back, someone tore up the garden at your foster parents' house?"

Sasuke had been carefully keeping step with Naruto, while Hinata trailed behind them, but he faltered at that. "What?"

"They got caught, and Tsunade kept them in jail for two days before even letting them talk to anyone . . . but. I don't really care about protecting them or whether they give a damn about me being alive or not."

Sasuke was beginning to curse the fact that Naruto was walking on his right side, so the only way he could draw a weapon would be with his bad hand.

Hinata was biting her lip. She started to reach out, but then drew her hand back. But when they reached a landing, she reached out and touched Naruto's wrist.

He didn't acknowledge the action for a moment; but when he took the next step off the landing, he reached back and took her hand in his own.

"I still will," Naruto said. "Even if I don't care, if anyone died, it might work back so that one of my precious people gets hurt by it. So I will. But, I told Sakura-chan, I'm gonna be Hokage so I can change things."

He squeezed Hinata's hand. "There's too much . . . it's fucked up. The Hyuuga branch house, the way we treat people who flunk out of the Academy or who don't want to join, all this clan-ranking bloodline crap, the way. . . . It's not _right_." He shoved open the door to the first floor. "I don't want to live anywhere but here, but there's stuff that needs to be fixed."

Sasuke chose his answer with more care than his slighting tone implied. "You can't build a utopia out of a ninja village."

"I'm gonna **try**," Naruto snapped. "I made **promises**, dammit."

_It's definitely him_, Sasuke decided.

He slid his good hand in his pocket. ". . . If it happens, it'll have to be you that does it. No one else would be stupid enough to dare."

Naruto didn't reply to that, but he did almost smile.

—

When they got outside, Hinata jerked her hand out of Naruto's a moment before he and Sasuke noticed Neji standing a little down the path.

(After allowing an hour to pass, Hiashi had given orders to one of the clan medicnins and an uncle to bring his daughter back; but when they learned that she was still in Naruto's company, they returned and the only other Hyuuga that Naruto could still tolerate was sent instead.) The hallway had been shut off by the time he got there, and Neji had found the silence and rumors that were starting to spread annoying enough to keep him outside.

He handed Hinata two small yellow pills and a canteen, which she accepted gratefully.

"Take them both," he said. "Hiashi-sama wants to speak with you as soon as you're home."

She nodded before taking a sip of water.

"Hey, hey, she's gonna be okay, right?" Naruto asked. "Don't let them yell at her."

"It's not a--" and then Neji finally noticed that Naruto looked normal but didn't have the faint trace of chakra that an illusion gave off. He turned and looked at him directly. A moment later, he activated the byakugan.

And then he gaped.

Naruto gave him a half-wave. "Yo."

Neji kept staring. Sasuke memorized the look on his face, because he doubted he would see anything like it again.

After half a minute passed, Naruto finally folded his arms protectively over his stomach and said, "Quit staring at my insides already, it's creepy."

Neji deactivated the byakugan and managed to regain his normal expression. He glanced at Hinata. She smiled faintly.

Finally, because he couldn't decide on which response he wanted to give, Neji just turned around and begin walking away. "We're late," he called back to Hinata.

She nodded and said goodbye to both of them, before catching up to his side. Neji belatedly braced a hand on her upper arm to help her walk steady.

Naruto and Sasuke lingered around the hospital for several more minutes, until an anbu came out and escorted Naruto to the tower.

——

Tsunade send Konoha's second fastest messenger bird looking for Jiraiya, with a note that he needed to get his ass back to Konoha before nightfall, if it was possible.

That was all she wrote, but she drew a little spiral in the bottom corner of the page.

——

Early that evening, Shizune arrived at Sasuke's apartment. She redid his bandages, gave him some salve so that he could take care of the burns on his own, and mentioned that he should have something for her to take back to the Hokage.

Sasuke dug the Fourth's scroll out from the hidden spot in the bathroom, briefly debated putting the highest seal he knew on it to be an ass, rejected the idea due to his hand, and gave it to her. Shizune didn't look at it as she tucked it inside the pack she was carrying.

"Do you have enough food for the next day or two?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. She nodded and left.

—

Night came, went, became the next day, and Kakashi stopped by to inform him that Sakura hadn't woken up yet. Sasuke cleaned the apartment, reorganized anything that was capable of being reorganized, and then practiced calisthenics until he was so tired that he fell asleep on the floor.

The day after that, Kakashi stopped by again and commented that he would loan Sasuke a futon if he needed it, before informing him that he and the others were allowed outside again--but unless Sasuke preferred to be mobbed by people with dozens of questions, he might want to stay in anyway. And Sakura still wasn't awake.

Sasuke chose to stay inside.

He made dinner in the early afternoon and took it over to Lee's, tearing across the roofs as quickly as he could. It made him more conspicuous, but it prevented anyone from talking to him.

Naruto was already there. The other teenager had bags under his eyes, but shrugged it off when Sasuke mentioned them, so he left the subject alone. Lee--who'd gone out as soon as he heard the news, visited the hospital, and then exercised until Gai had to drag him home nearly unconscious--told them the full story as he had heard it.

Apparently Tsunade had kept as closely to the facts as she could, with only a few small alterations: Sasuke had not touched the seal at all, and Naruto's chakra had not been as extensively intertwined with the fox demon's, and Sakura had done this with Tsunade's permission. She couldn't add "supervision," since the anbu who had been in the vicinity would know that was a lie.

Tsunade would have had a lot more trouble if Oukei hadn't said that he had been sparring with Lee and lost the long fight. (Quite a few of the anbu knew that Lee didn't use needles as a weapon and Sakura did, but he wouldn't change his story.) Shizune was the one who treated him for the drug Sakura had used, and there was no worry about her telling anyone.

"But," Naruto said, toying with his chopsticks instead of eating, "how'd that work? Any of the Hyuugas could see how bad it was, not just Neji and Hinata."

"It wouldn't do for everyone to find out that the former clan heir did something that dangerous to the village," Sasuke replied, "since it bordered on treasonous. I'm sure the Hokage mentioned that to Hiashi."

Lee made a motion that would have been a nod if he weren't still lying on the couch. "That would be logical."

Naruto continued rubbing the chopsticks together absently.

—

Less than half an hour after Sasuke arrived, Tenten dropped by. She had also brought dinner for Lee, and she told him that neither she nor Gai had heard from Neji. She tried to hide the fact that she was staring at Naruto from the corner of her eye as she spoke.

The Hyuuga compound had apparently closed itself off to outsiders, because as soon as Kiba and Shino heard the news, they tried to go see Hinata; and when they were turned aside at the gate, they also made their way to Lee's apartment. Tenten had left by then, but Ino and Shikamaru had just arrived and were taking advantage of the extra food.

Ino had shown up as Tenten was leaving. Sasuke guessed from the loud (mostly one-sided) argument she was having with Shikamaru that they had already come by several times, but Lee had still been out.

Sasuke had opened the door when she banged on it, since Lee's left knee popped whenever he moved too much. Ino had taken two steps into the apartment, demanding to know what nonsense was spreading all over the village; and then she saw Naruto.

"Oh shit," Ino said quietly, an arm reflexively lifting toward her heart before she stopped it. "It's true, isn't it? They wouldn't let me in at the hospital."

Naruto nodded.

They had to explain everything in vague comments, and then had to start over when Kiba and Shino arrived, and by the time Gai appeared (also bearing food) and chased everyone out, Sasuke had been planning his escape anyway.

"It's like I'm on display or something," Naruto muttered beside him as they took the long route along the walls to their respective apartments.

Sasuke made a wordless noise of agreement, and Naruto looked back over his shoulder. "Are you sure it's okay to leave him alone? I mean, he can get . . . kinda nuts."

Sasuke nodded. "Gai's there. And he won't try to commit suicide until after Sakura's death is confirmed. As long as she's still okay. . . . Besides, the Hokage wouldn't inform him before us. We'll know to stop him."

Sasuke suspected that Iruka and Gai would be the first ones told, and Iruka would contact him and Kakashi for help in handling Naruto while Gai dealt with Lee, but he didn't mention that.

Naruto stared at him. "You really think. . . ?" He clenched his hands into fists. ". . . Yeah. He would, I bet. **Shit**!"

"Keep your voice down," Sasuke said, looking up at the window of a nearby building. "I'm sick of people asking questions for tonight."

Naruto didn't reply.

He didn't speak for a long time; and when they were only a few streets from the blond's apartment, Sasuke was beginning to think he should say something before leaving.

"Hey," Naruto said suddenly, interrupting Sasuke's thoughts.

"What?" he asked when the other teenager didn't continue.

"You . . . you hate feeling indebted and stuff. Did you agree because you thought you owed me? Because I said back then, about training to find you. . . ?"

"Yes," Sasuke said.

Naruto nodded once.

They crossed onto another street, finally pulling away from the walls, and Sasuke slid his good hand into his pocket and began tapping his fingers against his leg.

When they turned onto the block that Naruto's apartment building was on, Sasuke clenched his hand into a fist before stopping. Naruto paused beside him.

"It wasn't just that," Sasuke said abruptly, glaring across the road.

"Yeah," Naruto replied, "I know."

Sasuke let his fist relax. Then he snorted and began walking again. Naruto kept pace.

". . . doesn't make you less of a jerk," the blond said a moment later.

"Doesn't make you less of an idiot," Sasuke replied.

Naruto grumbled a retort under his breath, but he let the subject drop.

—

The next morning, about an hour after dawn, Naruto showed up bashing on his door.

"**Damn** it," Sasuke swore as he opened the door, "I **told** you--"

"She's up!"

He blinked. "What? Who said that?"

"No one, I just can tell." He grabbed Sasuke's collar and tried to drag him out of the room. "C'mon, we gotta get Lee!"

"I need pants, idiot."

Lee was already gone from his apartment, so they tore off for the hospital. Sasuke noticed with a frown that Naruto was using way too much chakra just to run over the roofs, but didn't bring it up.

At the hospital, one of the nurses yelled at them for running through the halls.

"Come **on**!" Naruto argued with the woman who was trying to stop them from getting into Sakura's room. "We just want to talk to her!"

"Visiting hours start at ten," she replied irritably. "You can come see if she's awake then."

Naruto made a frustrated noise and shoved his way under her arm. He darted for the door, and Sasuke slipped past on the other side while the woman was trying to grab Naruto's jacket.

"Hey, Sakura-chan!" he called, pulling the door open.

Sakura had been staring at the vase of flowers on the stand, but she started and looked over at Naruto and Sasuke with that. Behind them, the woman froze.

"Oh!" she whispered, before turning and striding down the hallway. "Haruno-san's awake!" she called to the nurses' station. "Send someone to the Hokage!"

Sasuke pulled the door shut behind him. As an afterthought, he locked it.

Naruto was already by the bed. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Sakura said. "Yeah, I'm fine. Hi, guys."

Naruto exhaled heavily, and slumped down to the floor. "You scared the crap out of me," he said, looking up at her.

Sakura paused. "You're not mad at me? For not. . . ?"

Naruto shook his head.

Sakura raised an eyebrow. "So you already took it out on Sasuke?"

"No," Sasuke replied, at the same time that Naruto sheepishly admitted "Yes."

Sakura stared at them for a moment, before she began laughing. She pulled her knees up and folded her arms on them. "Okay," she said, shaking her head.

Then her grin faded, and she asked, "How much trouble are we in?"

"Tsunade confiscated that scroll Sasuke brought you," Naruto said, standing up again.

Sakura's eyes widened, and she looked over at him. Sasuke shrugged. "No one's said anything yet. I hid the rest."

They told her the official explanation Tsunade had put out--Sakura snorted when she heard that she'd had permission--including their suspicions of how the Hyuugas were going to be kept quiet. When Sakura asked if Naruto was supposed to never take his shirt off for the rest of his life, he showed how the secondary seal wasn't all that visible over the original, especially from a distance.

"Cool," Sakura said. "I don't know how many people are going to believe it, but I guess as long as they don't know the truth. . . ."

"The Hyuuga clan has blackmail over all us, now," Sasuke muttered, leaning against the wall. "She could have thought of something better. Isn't age supposed to bring wisdom?"

Naruto snickered as he shrugged back into his jacket. Sakura covered her mouth.

A moment later, she shrugged a shoulder. "It could be worse."

Sasuke nodded. A brief silence fell.

"We were gonna bring Lee," Naruto said, "but he was already gone when we got to the apartment."

Sakura hesitated for a second before waving her hand. "Let me guess--he's out trying to work himself to death. 'If I run around the top of the walls of Konoha two hundred times, Sakura will be okay!'"

"It's probably five hundred," Naruto said with a grin. "He was pretty exhausted when we saw him last night."

Sakura made an exasperated noise. "And Ino-chan's pissed at me, isn't she?"

"Huh?"

Sakura pointed a thumb at the vase. "That is the ugliest flower arrangement _ever made_. I don't think it could be worse unless she'd thrown weeds in there."

Naruto gave the vase a curious look. "It looks fine to me," he said.

"She dyed the chrysanthemums **blue**!"

". . . I like blue?"

Sakura gave up and shook her head. "This is why you guys didn't have to learn all this stuff."

The door jerked, then rattled once. Then there was a pause.

"_Oi_," Tsunade said, and that was sufficient.

Naruto let her in.

—

Tsunade made them stand to the side while she ran several tests on Sakura's reflexes and memory. Sakura answered all her questions easily enough, but when Tsunade asked her to create enough chakra for a simple illusion, Sakura winced painfully.

"Don't try to force it," Tsunade said, pushing the teenager's hands apart.

The room was quiet enough for the thin hum of chakra to be heard as Tsunade examined Sakura further. Sasuke leaned against the wall, watching, while Naruto fiddled with the curtains.

"It doesn't feel permanent," Tsunade finally said. "You just strained yourself badly. In a week, two, you should be able to do most jutsus. You really were born on a lucky day, you know that?" she added.

Sakura nodded.

"I assume they filled you in on the last few days?" When Sakura nodded again, Tsunade took a step back. "Good. You have to stay in here for at least another day, so they can make sure you're stabilized. I'll speak to you afterward."

"Yes, Tsunade-sensei," Sakura said, carefully, as though she weren't sure that was the term she could use anymore. She folded her hands and pressed her thumbs together.

Tsunade gave her another glance, before studying the whole team. Sasuke was looking out one of the windows, and Naruto was staring at her, and Sakura was gazing at the blanket.

Tsunade shook her head and settled her hands on her hips. "_Hell_," she said vehemently. "You guys are the most trouble. . . ."

"Please **don't** run!" one of the nurses called outside.

A moment later, Lee skidded past the door, barely managing to catch the frame and shove himself back toward the entrance. He leaned heavily against the frame, staring at Sakura. She stared back.

After a moment, Sakura put on a smile. "Hey, don't wear yourself out! You didn't have to run. . . ." She paused, and then gave him a victory sign. "I promised you, didn't I?"

Lee nodded, and his grin almost hid the tears that were starting to form. "Yeah!" he said, giving her a thumbs up in return. "I'll always believe it."

Sakura's smile faltered, and she bit her lip. When her shoulders started shaking, she covered her face with her hands.

Lee sat down on the bed and hugged her tightly. Sakura gripped his shoulders and hid her face in them, sobbing.

He rocked slightly, stroking her hair and kissing it and anything else he could reach. "Sakura," Lee kept murmuring. "I was so . . . _Sakura_."

She just tried to pull him closer.

Sasuke stood up and walked out of the room. Naruto and Tsunade followed him a second later, and she pulled the door shut behind them. Tsunade leaned heavily against the frame for a moment.

"Fifteen," she finally murmured, before straightening up. She looked over at Naruto and Sasuke. "You guys . . . just go home." She waved them away. "Go do what you want. Don't start any fights."

She turned away and headed toward the exit.

Naruto briefly watched Tsunade depart before turning back to stare at the door to Sakura's room. "I've never seen her cry," he said quietly. "Not since you. . . ."

Sasuke nodded once.

Another minute passed, while they stood outside the door.

When it became obvious that Lee wasn't leaving, Sasuke looked over at Naruto. "Do you want to leave a message for Hinata before getting breakfast?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding once. "That's . . . yeah. Okay."

They left quietly.  
-

_Through the cracks we breathe._


	16. ripple 16: team seven redux

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

Roast mice, sake, rice, and fried bean curd are all favorite foods of fox spirits. And I have caved and used the fanon name for the fourth Hokage.  
——————

**-'**

Jiraiya had been in the Lightning country, investigating a rumor about an Akatsuki member who had originally come from there, when Tsunade's message reached him. He summoned Gama Bunta and bribed him with the promise of sake and the news that his underling had gotten himself into _some_ mess and it would probably look bad on the family if they didn't get back to the Leaf fast so Jiraiya could beat some sense into his thick head--but he still couldn't make it back in less than two days.

The village was still standing when he got there, so Jiraiya stopped worrying that Akatsuki had come and started worrying that something had gone wrong enough that Tsunade had finally had to kill Naruto.

He'd been almost right on the second account, he found out. Almost. Naruto had had terrible nightmares the evening after the surgery, and Tsunade and Shizune had stayed awake the whole night, watching the shifts in the coloring of his seal.

Jiraiya sat on the couch and opened the scroll Tsunade had tossed at him when he walked in the door, while she glared out the window at the sunset and ranted about children and stupidity and making her life a living hell trying to subvert the clan heads and the police and she was _sure_ that when Sarutobi-sensei said he hoped they would all have a team that put them through as much trouble as they had him, he hadn't meant like _this_.

Jiraiya immediately recognized his student's work and his teammate's handwriting, and let his breath out in a hiss. Tsunade turned around and sat down at the desk.

"Did you see him when you came in?" she asked.

Jiraiya shook his head. "I came straight here. I assumed. . . ."

Tsunade pursed her lips and looked at the window again. "He's back to normal. Exactly. You'd think the last two years never happened . . . and they fucked with the fox demon's seal in the **village**. They went behind everyone's back and did it in **here**, and the Hyuuga are breathing down my neck to have the three of them disciplined. . . ."

Jiraiya glanced up without moving his head. "Was it Sakura's idea?"

Tsunade rested her chin on her hand and stared out the window.

Jiraiya looked back at the scroll. "You shouldn't have taught her torture," he said after a silence. "It affects everyone differently. And these kids didn't grow up in a war . . . she was too young."

"She went through three years' medical training in little more than a year," Tsunade replied. "It was either teach her that, or jutsus that are better left forgotten, or turn her out. And she had Lee by then, he was a stabilizing influence for. . . . No, you're right." She folded her hands, still staring out the window.

"It's understandable," Jiraiya said when she didn't continue. "She was the first student you ever really took on."

He unrolled the scroll a little further. "I wanted to teach Arashi everything I knew, too."

Tsunade shifted to face the desk at that, finally turning her back on the mountain.

——

When Sasuke went to the hospital the next morning to talk to Sakura, he was surprised to find access to her room restricted to family only. The nurse on duty wouldn't tell him why that had happened, and offered to take down a message.

There was no chance of Sasuke telling a stranger what Naruto had said to him and Hinata. He turned down her offer and went to visit his foster parents instead.

The Tojoin family had been related to the Uchiha clan several generations ago, through a shared cousin twice removed or such--but the sharingan had been completely bred out of their genes by current time, and Itachi hadn't wasted effort on them. They had taken Sasuke in when he was released from the hospital, and he lived there until he moved out the day after graduation.

His younger foster sister had opened the door when he knocked, recognized him, and for a moment looked torn between slamming the door and saying hello. After a few seconds she just held it open without a word.

Sasuke nodded briefly to her, slipped out of his sandals, and called a greeting. From down the hall, he heard the sound of dishes clattering into the sink.

Three minutes later, Sasuke was sitting at the low table in the dining room while Tojoin Chinatsu set a cup of tea in front of him. She settled across from him, and after they exchanged pleasantries, Sasuke picked up his tea and asked about her garden.

Chinatsu paused for a moment, then said it was doing fine. Sasuke asked about the peach trees.

Chinatsu picked up her own tea.

The conversation involved a lot of formal language and lasted for nearly half an hour, during which Shin came home and was warned about everything by his daughter. Eventually Chinatsu realized that Sasuke refused to leave until she agreed to let him pay for the tree that had been destroyed over three months ago. She argued that Shin had already replaced it with a new sapling, and Sasuke said that she could use the money to buy the specific type of soil the trees needed.

When the details of the transfer were settled, Chinatsu invited Sasuke to stay for lunch. Sasuke pretended he didn't hear the rattle of Shin's newspaper when he declined.

"You ought to dress warmer, Sasuke-san," Chinatsu said hesitantly as she stood by the entryway. "It's almost winter."

Sasuke didn't look up from tugging on his sandals. "I haven't had the time to go shopping yet. Thank you for your concern, Chinatsu-san."

The tone of his voice had ended the conversation. She closed the door once he stepped off the porch, and Sasuke left to work things out with the bank.

After that was done, he went over the amount of money he had left in his account, compared it to his rent, rewrote his budget, and then broke into the Forest of Death and caught dinner.

Naruto came over while he was awkwardly skinning the rabbit in the kitchen sink.

The other teenager made a disgusted noise. "Is that one of those . . . whatever hares?" he asked, leaning one elbow on the counter and using his free hand to hold the rabbit so Sasuke could work easier.

"Hispid hares," Sasuke said, shifting his grip on the knife, and, "It's not for the snake."

". . . Oh," Naruto said half a minute later.

Once, just once, five months after Naruto had been kicked out of the last foster home that would take him in out of respect for his father and had started living on his own, the check that he received monthly hadn't come. Sarutobi hadn't known about the problem, since he had been busy struggling to repair the ties between the Hidden Mist and the Hidden Stone without creating any alliances beyond the Hidden Leaf's sphere of influence. He did move the man who had been in charge of the situation to a lower-ranked, lower-paying job immediately after it was brought to his attention, though the man had argued that it had been an honest mistake.

Naruto had run out of money a week into the new month, and quickly learned that no one was willing to sell him things on credit. The rent to his apartment was taken care of separately, so he didn't have to worry about that; but he had no way to buy food or necessities. He stole toilet paper out of public bathrooms and tried scrounging for food at first, but it was early spring and most of the crops were just being planted, and he couldn't get into the Forest of Death or out of the village walls to hunt. When he hadn't had breakfast for three days and had been yelled at for half an hour by Iruka for being caught stealing food from one of his classmates, Naruto broke into the classroom that was a lab for genjutsu and took five mice.

Iruka saw him trying to sneak out of the school with the mice under his jacket, and dragged him back to the room. As the man was trying to set the mice back into the cage while preventing them from running up his arm, he demanded to know what kind prank Naruto had been planning.

Sullen and ashamed, Naruto had finally admitted, "I was going to eat them."

(It would take him a couple more years to understand why Iruka froze when he said that.)

Through several careful questions, Iruka finally figured out what had happened. He took Naruto out to dinner at Ichiraku that night, and bought him enough food to make breakfast and lunch for tomorrow; and the next day, when Naruto came back from the academy, he found the check sitting on his table with a note of apology from Sarutobi.

Naruto had been so grateful to Iruka that he didn't pull any pranks on the man for four whole days.

The situation had left a permanent mark on him, though--if anyone ever examined Naruto's cupboards, they would notice that he always kept three days' advance worth of food. He didn't really think he would be left to starve again, and he was a lot better at hunting and was capable of leaving the village now, but it was a habit.

Naruto leaned his other elbow on the counter and propped his chin up with his free fist. "That thing's too skinny to be worth all this trouble," he said. "You should eat cup ramen. It's easier to store--I've got plenty."

Sasuke paused.

"I wouldn't eat that crap you call food if I were starving," he said without looking over, and jerked the knife up to tear off a long strip of fur and skin.

Naruto shrugged a shoulder. "Yeah, well, you're an idiot. Did you try to see Sakura-chan today too?" he added.

"Yes. They didn't let me in."

"Me neither." Naruto shifted so that he was leaning his back against the counter, but kept holding the rabbit down. "Lee managed to get in, though, since he's her fiancé and stuff, and he said her parents did it yesterday. She's trying to force the doctor to transfer the billing to her instead of them so she can take it off."

Sasuke frowned. "She can't just ask them to do it?"

Naruto scratched his temple. "Sakura-chan fights with her parents a lot," he said. "Especially since she started training with Tsunade and going on missions with the jounin and anbu." He scraped the heel of his shoe on the floor and leaned more heavily against the counter. "I don't know much about it because she won't talk about them. Not even to Lee. He thinks the only person she really talks about them with is Ino."

". . . That makes sense," Sasuke said, putting down the knife and moving the bloody strips of fur to the counter.

"I guess," Naruto said.

He lingered for a few more minutes, and tried to convince Sasuke to eat dinner at his apartment until the other teenager kicked him out.

After Sasuke cooked the meat and made an attempt at salting some of it so it would last longer, he washed off the fur and measured whether there was enough to sew a pair of gloves. There wasn't, so he decided to let it dry and use it to line the pockets of his pants.

—

The next morning, Kakashi dropped by at an obscenely early hour in the morning (for him) and suggested that they go out for breakfast. Sasuke made a note to slug Naruto the next time he saw him, and agreed.

While they were eating, Kakashi said that the restriction on Sakura's room had been lifted, if Sasuke wanted to go see her.

He nodded. A moment later, though, he asked whether Naruto knew yet. Kakashi shook his head.

"Would you not tell him for an hour?" Sasuke asked, not looking up from his miso soup.

Kakashi paused, but when Sasuke didn't explain his request, he finally agreed. The teenager just nodded again and left when he was done.

—

Ino was already in the room when Sasuke arrived at the hospital. He could hear Sakura complaining to her when he was half a meter from the closed door.

"--work for the _Hokage_, I've gone on missions that make more money in a week than they do in two months . . . I've **killed** people. I've nearly **been** killed! I'm an adult by the village's standards, but they _just won't accept it!_ It makes me want to scream!"

"Sucks to have non-shinobi parents," came the cheerful reply.

"You're not helping, Ino-pig-chan."

Sasuke knocked on the door.

Ino pulled it open a moment later, and her expression shifted when she saw it was him. Sakura sat up a little further.

"Hey, Sasuke!" she said in a tone that made Ino step away and let him in. "Sorry about yesterday--the nurse on duty said you came by?"

"Yeah," he said, sliding his good hand into his pocket. "I need to talk to you about something."

And then he waited.

Ino caught on after a few seconds of silence. She looked over at Sakura, and then turned away, tossing her bangs back. "_I've_ got to get to work," she said haughtily, moving toward the door. "Some of us can't just lounge around all day."

Sakura rolled her eyes, but didn't retort; and Ino left.

When the door had been pulled shut, Sakura looked over at him. "Naruto?"

Sasuke nodded.

Sakura pushed the blankets back. "Can you tell me in the garden? I can't stay in bed any longer--I need to move."

"Is anyone usually there around now?"

"No . . . and you can see anybody who's coming from the tree to the right, the one that's by the blank wall."

"Yes, then," Sasuke said, and Sakura stood up.

—

Sakura used a crutch to walk out to the garden, but she told him it was only to keep the medical staff happy. "I was pretty unbalanced the first day, since I hadn't built back much chakra yet."

"Hn," he replied.

When they'd settled in against the blank wall and made sure that no one would be able to hear them before they saw them first, Sasuke told Sakura everything that Naruto had said to him and Hinata four days ago.

Sakura propped the crutch in front of her while he talked, folding her hands over the top; and when he was done she sighed quietly and rested her chin on them.

"I was afraid of that," she whispered. "It was bad enough with Neji, but when Hinata. . . ." She leaned forward slightly, and the bottom of the crutch dug into the grass. "It wasn't really any of the people in our class," she explained. "Not the ones that got to know him, at least. But the kids . . . they were easier to brainwash since he looked the way he did, and the adults. . . ." She sneered the last word slightly. "I don't think they're ever going to forget 'what' he is. I'm not sure he'll ever be able to make them forget."

She shoved backwards, digging up more grass. "And he's **stupid**, he only thinks about power in terms of strength, he didn't think about the consequences of making enemies of the most powerful clan in the village. . . ." She started to bite her lip, and then stopped. ". . . We were going to lose him one way or another."

Sasuke leaned further against the wall, and didn't reply.

"Even **this** isn't enough," she muttered. "I heard the doctors talking about 'aftereffects' in the hallway last night."

"Aftereffects?" Sasuke repeated. "What are they waiting for, him to start drinking sake? Or eating rice instead of ramen?"

It took Sakura a moment to catch the joke, but then she laughed.

"Or fried bean curd," she added with a giggle. "If he starts eating _that_, we're doomed."

"Bean curd could be explained," Sasuke said. "It's when he wants roast mice that I'll worry."

Sakura laughed again and leaned back against the wall, shaking her head.

They were back in the room by the time Naruto arrived.

——

For the first week or so, nobody knew what the hell to do about Naruto. After he'd decided that Sakura would be okay, he seemed determined to get rid of over a year's worth of pent-up energy in a few days. Not even Iruka could convince him to walk places if there was enough room to run.

When Tsunade came to check on Sakura two days later, for the last time, she said that the teenager must have burned away several dozen of Naruto's brain cells during the surgery. Jiraiya said it was more likely a baker's dozen. At the least.

Sakura said they wouldn't have noticed anything different if it was that few, and Tsunade snickered and left to arrange for her to be released from the hospital. She told Sakura to come by her office tomorrow so they could test how much chakra she was able to use so far, and how precisely.

——

That night, Sasuke woke up abruptly when he realized someone else was in his room. He already had his sword half-drawn before he saw the snake lying at the foot of his futon.

Sasuke sheathed the katana. "Don't surprise me like that, please."

"Why not? Your reflexes are entertaining," Kyomamushi replied. When Sasuke just stared at it, the viper shifted enough to show it was lying on fabric that wasn't part of the quilt. It used its head to push it closer to Sasuke.

When the teenager picked the fabric up, he realized that it was a dark long-sleeved shirt. There was also a pair of long pants, and when he looked past the snake, he noticed a pair of boots sitting by the bed.

". . . Who did you get these from?"

"Just wear the clothes, Sasuke," Kyomamushi replied, curling around once. "It was no one in Fire country."

When Sasuke remained silent, it said, "If you die of exposure, I won't have anything to do until someone else signs the contract. And that will be boring."

". . . Fine," Sasuke said, examining the shirt by the faint light from the window. "Thank you."

The viper didn't reply and just disappeared.

——

The next day, Jiraiya was staring out the window in Tsunade's office with an amused expression, as he watched Naruto running pell-mell over the rooftops while Sasuke tried to keep up with him. "It's good to see he's back to normal."

Tsunade raised an eyebrow. She was sitting at the desk, so he couldn't see it, but he knew she did.

Jiraiya leaned back against the window and looked up at the mountain. "Did you notice?"

"That he's a hyperactive brat?" she replied. "How was I supposed to miss it?"

"How much they're starting to look alike," Jiraiya clarified, and Tsunade didn't answer.

He folded his arms. "It wasn't obvious before, when he was like that, but now. . . ."

"Everyone who was there knows whose son was used," Tsunade said, not looking back. "And I doubt anyone younger will think of associating them. It's not like there's a way to hide it," she added.

Jiraiya continued to stare out the window.

Several moments later, there was a knock on the door. When Tsunade called out, Sakura pushed it open.

"Um, you didn't give me a specific time to show up, so Shizune-san said that now would probably be good. . . ."

Tsunade waved her forward. "Yeah, come in. Have you tried doing any jutsus on your own?"

"Not yet," Sakura said. "I figured it would be better to wait, just in case."

Tsunade nodded and put her paperwork aside.

——

That evening, Sakura stopped by and told Sasuke to come shopping, since he was eating dinner with her and Lee and Naruto that night. Sasuke started to argue, but Sakura added "I need to talk to you about something" in the exact same tone he had used two days before.

"When did you get new clothes?" she asked as they were walking down to the street.

"Yesterday," he replied.

Sakura went to the Asahari grocery out of habit rather than any predilection, but to her surprise they smiled and treated her like a human being and rang up her order immediately. Saori even added two apples, and when Sakura tried to turn them down, her father said they were a gift and waved off her offer to pay.

After she and Sasuke left, Sakura gave the bag an amused look. She offered one of the apples to Sasuke, but when he shook his head she hooked the strap over her wrist and started polishing it on her outer skirt. "Free food, even--I could get used to this!"

Sasuke snorted. "It's hypocritical."

"Well, _duh_," Sakura said, a word and habit that she'd picked up from Ino. "But I've never had people do stuff for me just because of my abilities, so let me enjoy it. Besides," she added, "it's nice to get the shopping done in under two hours again."

Sasuke shook his head faintly, but didn't say anything else. Sakura bit into the apple.

When they rounded the second block, though, and the view widened enough that they could see the mountain, her pace changed. Sasuke matched it.

Sakura took another bite of the apple, wiped away the juice with her thumb, and then said, "You know, Naruto looks a lot like the fourth Hokage."

Sasuke slowed, but when Sakura kept walking he returned to her pace. "I noticed."

"I mean, he looks a **lot** like the Fourth."

"I read the scroll too," Sasuke said impassively, sliding his right hand into his pocket.

Sakura's lips curled back. "He didn't **have** to seal the demon inside him--it wasn't that draining of a jutsu, not for _him_."

"You said that already."

Sakura tore off a bite of the apple viciously.

"Naruto's looked in a mirror before," Sasuke said. "He's not blind. Either he's already dealt with it, or he doesn't want to acknowledge him."

". . . I can't stand it," she whispered harshly. "I can't stand the thought of. . . . If it wasn't necessary, then why . . . what kind of father--"

"Would it have been better if he used someone else's son?" Sasuke asked.

When Sakura didn't reply, Sasuke continued. "Don't judge based on what other people have done. W--. . . we don't know what really happened," he said, flexing his bandaged hand absently and remembering that second chakra inside Naruto.

"He should have _guessed_," she replied. "How would anyone react if they thinking they're housing a murderer? It wasn't **necessary**!"

". . . Do you know if the sannin had left the village by then?" Sasuke asked.

Sakura looked at him. "What?"

"When it happened, had the sannin already left?" Sasuke repeated.

". . . I'm not sure," Sakura said.

"If they hadn't, then I'll agree with you," he said. "But if they had, and he used that death god jutsu, he was going to die no matter what. And all that would have been left to protect the village was the aging third Hokage. And the war was still going on then, wasn't it?"

". . . That's still too long of a time lapse. While they were waiting for Naruto to grow up enough to be trained--"

"Maybe it couldn't be sealed into an adult," Sasuke interrupted with a shrug. "A delay is better than nothing, especially if he was kept hidden from our enemies. There's worse legacies."

Sakura took another bite of her apple. "Why are you defending him?"

Sasuke flexed his palm again, and this time Sakura noticed and frowned slightly. "We don't know what happened," was all he finally said.

Sakura didn't argue any further.

They walked along quietly for several blocks, until Sasuke started to frown and then abruptly turned down the first available street. Sakura followed, glancing behind her as she did, and saw Anko striding down the sidewalk several meters away.

She made a tsking noise. "You know, maybe if you two hadn't tried to tear each other's jugulars out back then, it would be easier to pass on the street."

"That's not it," Sasuke said.

Sakura gave him a curious look, but he didn't say anything more. She continued to walk next to him in a silence that was blatantly expectant.

"You know that song Naruto picked up from some gambling parlor?" she finally said as they began looping their way back to Lee's apartment. "The one that has four notes and repeats all the time and gets stuck in your head the second you hear it? Don't make me start humming it."

"It's already **in **my head, now," Sasuke said dryly. "Thanks."

"I'll hum it _all the time_."

"Jackets restrict movement," Sasuke said, and Sakura had to switch rapidly back to the previous subject. "She didn't wear it much while we were sparring."

". . . What does . . . oh." She pressed her lips together slightly. "I . . . what, you like _older_ women?"

"No," Sasuke replied. "I don't like her, either. . . . She acts too much like the idiot. But I haven't had sex for a few months, and Anko would be the easiest person to ask. And she refuses to wear shirts like a decent woman, even in winter," he added in irritation.

Sakura was silent for exactly five seconds before bursting into giggles. Sasuke gave her a half-annoyed look.

"You . . . I can't believe you just . . . out _loud_. . . ." She managed to get control of herself, but then said "**You**, of all--" and had another gigglefit.

She was still laughing when they met up with Naruto on the street before Lee's apartment building. When the other teenager asked what was so funny, Sasuke shrugged a shoulder to show that Sakura hadn't put together a coherent enough sentence for him to understand it, either.  
-

After dinner, while Naruto was cajoling Lee into playing a card game that involved slamming their hands on the table a lot, Sasuke asked Sakura to lend him her sewing kit. He needed to hem his shirt--the sleeves were too long.

——

"He did this on purpose," Tsunade muttered, tossing Sasuke's bank statement onto her desk. "The little bastard's testing me."

Jiraiya lounged back in the chair he'd pulled up to the desk. "Are you sure? I think he would have waited until the trouble with the Hyuugas settled down first. He's not stupid."

She pushed the statement towards him. "He now has enough money for one more month's rent. Maybe two, if he has other people buy his meals. Even if he didn't know about this--" she waved a hand at the letter Chinatsu had sent "--I give him enough credit to have assumed we're watching his accounts. I told the bank they can authorize transferring the property to him, but he hasn't done that yet."

Jiraiya studied the bank statement with a carefully bemused expression.

Tsunade folded her hands and glared at the letter. "Either I have to start letting him go on missions again, or at the end of the month he'll be starving and homeless. And he's too damned proud to live with any of his teammates, so he'll probably wind up living in his family's compound while selling some of it off."

"That won't look good," Jiraiya agreed.

"I don't like the thought of that child living there," Tsunade replied. "He makes enough of his ghosts already."

"You could just order him to move in with one of them," Jiraiya suggested, setting down the statement and picking up a folder. "Naruto's still being supplemented by taxes until he gets missions again. You might as well keep him there--he'll make the brat eat healthier."

"Until I have to deal with the landlord because one of them put the other through a wall," Tsunade said wryly.

"I don't think so," Jiraiya replied. "Now that they've gotten comfortable with who they've become over the last few years, they aren't fighting like they're still twelve as often."

Tsunade was quiet for a few moments, reflecting.

Jiraiya pulled one of the sheets of paper out of the folder and brought it closer in order to read the small, precise handwriting of Itachi's last anbu team report.

Tsunade snorted. "That just happened to show up in my file cabinet yesterday, after I left Shizune a note to schedule a meeting with several of the people left from his team."

"Sakura figured it out just from that?"

"Figured it out _and_ broke into the vaults. I asked the guards down there when she last visited, and they said she never showed up at all." Tsunade sounded mildly impressed despite herself.

—

Chinatsu's letter had been short, beyond the necessary formalities. She wrote to Tsunade that Sasuke was essentially a good child--Itachi had just killed him mentally, rather than physically like the rest of his kin. She said that she recognized the gravity of what he had done, and that no extenuating circumstances were an excuse; but she asked that they be considered anyway.

It wasn't the first time Tsunade had been asked to consider Sasuke in light of Itachi. This time, she started looking into it.

The members of the anbu team that Itachi had been captain of gave similar accounts of the young man: he had been excellent at everything he did, but there had always been something about him that unsettled people. That seemed to fit in with the information in the folder, which told Tsunade that a month before the massacre of the Uchiha clan, Itachi had been given only solitary work as an anbu.

One man who was also a police officer, and thus had had more contact with the Uchiha family than the others, said he had gotten the impression from other officers that the only two people who had been close enough to Itachi to think favorably of him were Shisui and Sasuke.

When she mentioned this to Kakashi, all he said was "That sounds about right."

Tsunade waited for an explanation, but Kakashi was engrossed in the file he'd been handed.

"Do _you_ happen to know why he suddenly got a disproportionate amount of assassination work?" she asked.

"Well, it wasn't really discussed," Kakashi said. "Most people assumed it was because he was making his team so nervous."

"Nervous."

"He hid it well," Kakashi said, turning a page, "but there were times when we could tell that he planned strategies by thinking of them as go pieces rather than human beings." He shrugged a shoulder. "But that's not the sort of thing you can petition about--several people just complained to the Third on their own. . . . I suppose the assassin work was the best solution he could come up with to appease both the team and the Uchiha clan."

Tsunade folded her hands and propped her elbows on her desk, covering a majority of her expression.

"How," she asked measuredly, "if the majority of his anbu team, and even Sarutobi-sensei and his own family didn't trust him, did he manage to remain in such high positions? Why didn't anyone think of the danger before that event happened?"

"Because he was a genius," Kakashi said, closing the file. "And at that time, we needed him."

Tsunade was silent for a long time.

"Thank you," she said finally. She held out a hand, and Kakashi brought the file back to her desk. "You can go now."

——

As it turned out, the sudden detachment from the fox demon's chakra did have two aftereffects.

The first one was that Naruto lost the precise chakra control that he'd worked so hard to regain over the last two years. He had grown used to expending an extra amount of chakra every time he did a jutsu or the like to push back the demon, and going back to using a normal amount was harder than he'd expected.

Sasuke eventually caught on, though, and after that Sakura and he started helping Naruto work on regaining better control.

In theory, at least.

"**Damn** it!" Naruto snapped, when his leg sunk into the river up to the knee. "I've been doing this for a fucking week now, what's not working? This **sucks**!"

"_You_ suck," Sasuke replied, standing a meter away with his arms folded. "Why don't you just go back to the Academy and start all over? I'm sure Iruka would be glad to see you in his class again."

"Shut up, asshole," Naruto replied, pushing up with enough chakra that the water was only slopping into his shoe.

On the bank, Sakura was sitting with her chin propped on her fist and watching them with her best why-won't-you-listen-to-the-medicnin-you-freaking-morons look. "Can't you practice this at the baths or something?" she said. "You're going to catch hypothermia."

"The cold is an incentive to learn faster, dammit!" he replied, glaring at his feet.

". . . How much have you been letting him train with Lee?" Sasuke asked her.

"Too much," Sakura replied with a raised eyebrow.

"You guys _aren't helping_," Naruto growled under his breath.

"It's not our fault you're beyond help," Sasuke replied.

Sakura's eyes widened when Naruto abruptly turned around and tackled Sasuke. The two of them crashed beneath the water.

She shoved herself onto her feet, but a moment later Naruto burst backwards out of the dark water. The way his body was curved told her he'd been kicked.

He landed thigh deep in the water, and was already slogging towards Sasuke before the other teenager had fully pushed himself onto the surface again.

Sakura knew better than to interfere. She had learned that a long time ago. She could fight alongside them, and she could spar against them, and she could break them apart when they got vicious, but there was no room for her _in_ their fights. And this wasn't any different from the thousand other impromptu sparring matches that had started because Sasuke was being an ass or Naruto had something else to prove.

Except it was too soon. It was too soon after the operation, it was too soon after Naruto had never apologized for slashing her with his claws, it was too soon after she'd made the mistake of saying Sasuke wouldn't leave until after he did her the favor, it was too soon after Naruto was _still_ growling with that guttural sound that strained human vocal cords.

And it was way too soon after Naruto had overheard her teasing Sasuke the other evening for his comment about Anko.

Sakura labeled the bad feeling she had as women's intuition and strode up to the river, hands on her hips.

"**Idiots**!" she yelled when Naruto resurfaced from another kick. "It's **winter**! Get out of the water or I'm not helping when you get sick, dammit!"

"Fine," Naruto said, crouching ankle-deep in the water and glaring at Sasuke.

Sakura let her breath out between her teeth. "Sasuke, act your age already," she called. When he gave her a quick glare, she jerked her head imperceptibly back, towards the ground.

He was still for a moment, and then snorted. "Whatever." He moved towards the bank.

Naruto started to chase him. "Hey, _coward!_"

Sasuke jumped onto the bank. Naruto skidded awkwardly in the water, turned, and leapt at him.

When he landed on the edge of the bank, however, Sakura grabbed his arm and yanked back hard. Naruto slipped on the mud, and she was dragged into the river with him.

_That better have worked_, she thought, as she tried very hard not to get a mouthful of river water and kicked up toward the surface.

The first thing she heard when she reached it was "**Shit**! Sakura-chan! I'm sorry!"

**_Good_**.

Sakura climbed onto the water and stomped her way towards the bank, wringing out her bangs. It looked like Sasuke hadn't realized her action had been deliberate and had tried to catch one of them, because there were more skid marks on the mud and he was knee-deep at the edge of the water. Naruto was still apologizing, making his way through the silt and over the rocks toward her.

"Sakura-chan?"

Sakura finished wringing out her hair, turned around, and shoved his head underwater. She then held him there, ignoring the flailing.

". . . It's a waste of the last month if you kill him," Sasuke commented from the bank.

Naruto stopped pressing up against her hands and suddenly dropped deeper, taking the most effective escape route of swimming along the current. Sakura let him go and trudged onto dry land.

"I can't tell if it's colder in or out," she muttered, mostly to herself, as she rubbed her arms futilely. Sasuke was busy unwrapping the sodden bandages around his hand.

Naruto had emerged from the water at what he deemed a safe distance of three meters away, and was shaking his head rapidly. "I _said_ I was sorry!" he called.

"I'm **freezing**!" she yelled back.

"Well, you let yourself fall in," he retorted, and Sakura's hands stilled briefly. Naruto gave her a wide grin. "We were just _sparring_, geez. Enjoying the springtime of our youth!"

Sasuke made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a 'you dumbass' sound as he wrung out the bandages.

"Keep your 'springtime of youth' from involving **me**, I get enough of it already!" Sakura yelled back, rubbing her arms more vigorously.

Naruto snickered and shook his hair out one last time before striding up to them. He seemed to willing to agree that it was too cold to keep fighting, though, so Sakura refrained from saying anything more.

When Sasuke started rewrapping his hand with the sodden bandages, she looked over. "Hey, that's not good for your burn. I have dry ones at Lee's. . . . Wait, it hasn't healed yet? It was just a chakra burn, right?"

"Yes," he said. "It's mostly healed. It doesn't really hurt anymore--the skin's just tight."

Naruto frowned. "Then why are you still wrapping it? Trying to get sympathy?"

Sasuke ignored the second question. "It hasn't faded enough yet. Sakura, you have marks, right?"

"Yeah," she said, holding out her hand palm up so he and Naruto could see the lingering traces of chakra burns that almost all medicnins had.

Sasuke held his hand beside hers, and she and Naruto could see how the pattern of the burn on his palm was much different from the ones on her fingertips. It had swirls.

"Huh," Naruto said, bending down a little to get a better look.

Sasuke pulled his hand away and went back to wrapping it. "Since the story is that I never touched your seal, I'm keeping it wrapped until it isn't as obvious."

"That's still pretty suspicious, though," Sakura mentioned as they started walking back to the village proper.

Sasuke shrugged. "If anyone asks, I'll say it got hurt while I was running to get the Hokage. You're not doing medical jutsus again yet, and I don't like having anyone else treat me. People will believe it."

_. . . Yeah, that could work_, she had to agree.

—

The walk back to their respective homes went about as well as could be expected. Naruto didn't seem to notice the people staring at them, Sasuke had some kind of genetic cool gene--which Sakura **really** wanted--that let him stroll down the sidewalk as if it was perfectly normal to be sopping wet in early November, and she was too busy trying to control her shivering to care if everyone thought they'd all gone insane.

They broke apart at the intersection that split off into the two streets that led to Lee's and to Sasuke's, and Naruto turned around in order to backtrack to the street his apartment was on.

Once Sakura was inside, she kicked off her boots with an irritated squelch. Lee finished his set of pushups and looked over, and then raised both eyebrows.

"Sakura! What happened?"

"Boys are _idiots_," she replied as she stormed towards the bathroom.

She slammed the door behind her, graciously absolving Lee from trying to find a reply to that.


	17. ripple 17: Kakashi redux

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

Because I did not know what I was getting into when I decided to take an intensive class in Italian during summer session, the next chapter won't be posted until some time in mid-July, whenthe final isdone.

When I said that chapter 12 was the longest thing I would ever write, I lied.  
——————

**-'**

A few days later, Kakashi stopped by his apartment again.

"Meet up with everyone at the bridge on the far side of town tomorrow morning at seven o'clock," the man told him. "We have a mission."

Sasuke watched him carefully. ". . . I still haven't been put on trial yet."

"Maybe you shouldn't mention that," was all Kakashi said, and "Pack for a week."

He left Sasuke's forehead protector at the apartment. The scratch along it had been mostly filled in with new metal, but Sasuke could see the mark where it cut directly across the lines of the leaf.

(Kakashi was the one who had pocketed the forehead protector and brought it back that day three years ago; but most people thought that it was Naruto who had held on to it, and he never corrected them.)

—

Naruto and Sakura were already there when he arrived at the bridge. For a few minutes, none of them were quite sure what to say, so they just waited.

But after those few minutes, it became clear that Kakashi was going to be late again; and by then things were too familiar not to relax a little bit.

Sakura huffed and sat on the railing. Sasuke leaned against it a meter away, and Naruto crossed to the other rail and jumped on. He began walking along the very edge, practicing his chakra control.

"I bet he's deliberately _never_ on time for anything," Sakura muttered. "It's probably some weird principle of honor."

"Do you know what we're supposed to be doing?" Naruto asked, looking over at her. "He told me we're heading straight out from here."

Sakura shook her head. "I don't know, but it must be something to do with the Sound."

Sasuke gave her a sideways glance. ". . . Why do you think that?"

"Because you're here," Sakura replied. She quickly related the story Tsunade had told her weeks ago, about Orochimaru getting out of being put on trial for negligence regarding his genin team.

"So it has to be something to do with them," she ended, "since you're the only person who would know best. She's probably not happy about it, though," Sakura added with a warning undercurrent.

Sasuke ignored the tone and looked out in the direction of the village, waiting for Kakashi to show up. Naruto had continued his slow pace along the edge of the railing while she spoke.

Kakashi arrived a surprising twenty minutes later, and he came with Temari.

"Hey, Temari-san!" Sakura called, jumping down from the rail.

"Hello," she called back, nodding to the three of them.

It turned out that Sakura had been correct. As Temari told them, the Lord of Fire country had contacted the Hidden Sand with a mission: the Lord of Grass country had sent him a notice that he suspected Soundnins were hiding there, and that several ninjas of the Hidden Grass sent to scout the locations had been killed. The Grass country was in the middle of a recession, and the government couldn't afford to pay its ninja village for an high class mission; so it had contacted Fire in hopes that, since they were harboring a former Soundnin, they would take care of the mess free of charge--or at least hire the Hidden Grass themselves.

But the Lord of Fire country and Tsunade were still not on the best of terms, so he had felt it fitting to send the mission on to the Hidden Sand.

"We had one of ours go missing to the Sound a couple years ago," Temari said by way of explanation, "and about half a year ago, he got back in contact with us and handed over a lot of information in exchange for the promise to return without being executed. He cut off contact abruptly, though, so we assumed he's dead." She looked over at Sasuke. "Do you know whether that's true? His name was Ito Junji."

Sasuke nodded. "He was buried alive by the Sound's Five after he was discovered."

Temari made a small disgusted motion with her mouth. "Sick sense of humor. . . . Did any of them happen to live?"

"No," Sasuke said, "they were all killed a few months ago."

"Ah," she said, and shrugged it off. "That data is old, so we thought it would be wise to contact Konoha anyway. You'll get half the pay we earn from this mission--is that acceptable?"

The four of them nodded, and Temari folded her arms. "The information that the Hidden Grass managed to collect indicates there are two main groups, one that's located in a large tourist village a few hours from Kusa and a smaller one that's near the border with Waterfall country. We've already sent a team of our ninjas to the group by the border, but we left the group near Kusa to you." She looked to Sasuke again. "They're the ones that have killed the most Grassnins, so we were hoping you would have the best knowledge of their fighting style."

He nodded once more, and Sakura frowned. "But if that group is so close to the Hidden Grass, why haven't they just sent a large group of ninjas to deal with them? How many are there supposed to be?"

"The information said between seven and ten," Temari told her. "And we're curious about that, too. The Lord of Grass country said they don't want to risk losing any more ninjas, but. . . ."

"The Hidden Grass hasn't been very connected to the country since the recession started," Sakura finished.

Temari nodded. "And the village itself is splitting into factions. So, if you'll bring any of the Soundnins you capture back to Suna alive, we'll find out what's really going on. Rain country already gave permission to cut through their territory, so just state what mission you're on at the border and you should be let through."

Kakashi, Sakura, and Sasuke all nodded again. Naruto said "Okay," and jumped off of where he'd been sitting on the railing.

"Please send the Kazekage our thanks for this," Sakura added.

Temari tilted her head with a smirk. "After everything you guys have done to make the Lord of Wind country back off of our village?" she said. "The least we can do is return the favor."

Sakura chuckled under her breath.

"Is there anything else to know?" Kakashi asked.

Temari thought about it. "According to the information we were supplied, most of the Soundnins are young," she said. "Some don't even have forehead protectors, though those might have been left behind. So be on the lookout for children or adolescents. There didn't seem to be anyone over twenty in either of the groups."

"No way," Naruto said. "The Hidden Grass was scared of a bunch of brats?"

Temari shrugged a shoulder. "That's why we want them brought back alive."

——

The Hidden Grass was just under three days from Konoha, moving at high speed, and the tourist village of Kamogaya was beyond it in the direction of the border between the Grass and Earth countries. They reached the border of Fire the morning of the third day.

A few copses were nearby the border and along the roads--but they weren't taking the roads, because those curved and the fastest way to Kamogaya was straight through the fields and plains. The trees thinned out rapidly as they moved along, soon leaving them with nothing but grassland.

"Whoa," Sakura said under her breath when they crested a hill only to find that there were no trees at all along the way down or in the plain before them. Sasuke glanced over at her.

"Have you been in terrain like this before?" he asked.

She shook her head, and Sasuke looked at Naruto. He nodded, adding "A little."

"You can mimic Naruto's moves better than mine or Kakashi-sensei's, right?" he asked Sakura, and this time she nodded. Sasuke looked to the man.

"I'll take the rear and cover our movements," Kakashi told him.

Sasuke nodded once, and then reached back and shifted his katana up so that it wasn't as far out over his shoulder. He ducked slightly and took off down the hill, moving through the tall grass with an ease that reminded Kakashi the majority of Sound country was composed of grass and marshland.

Naruto followed, with Sakura behind him, and Kakashi took his place at the end, making sure to shift the grass back upright where Sakura had pushed it too much aside and to smear their footprints into blurry lines in the dirt.

—

They stopped for a late lunch two kilometers from the road they would be taking into Kamogaya. A small rise in the ground blocked them from view.

"It's so _bright_," Sakura replied. "It's like all the sun is going to blind me."

Naruto laughed. "I know, it's creepy." He bit off a piece of dried jerky and chewed thoughtfully. ". . . But Earth country is worse. At least here there's grass for cover--there it's nothing but mountains, and when you're at the top of one, there's _nothing_. It's like **inviting** somebody to attack you! And then there's all the crevices and stuff that go up the mountains--and all the roads run over at least one." He snickered. "I don't know how all the Stonenins aren't totally paranoid."

"Keh," Sakura said, making a face. "I like trees. I'll stick with trees."

"The view's cool, though," Naruto said. "Some of the places there--you know the view from the top of our mountain? It's like . . . five times that. Especially this one place, that's got some weird name because of an old superstition . . . uh. . . ."

"Enchanted Rock," Sasuke supplied.

"Yeah, there!" Naruto grinned. "You've **got** to see that view, Sakura-chan, it's so cool. Even if it sucks to have no cover, it's still awesome."

". . . You can see the birds flying underneath you," Sasuke added, looking down at his food.

Sakura was laughing slightly. "Okay, I believe you. It sounds cool."

Naruto looked over at Sasuke. "Did you ever go to those caverns? The ones named after a bridge or something?"

Sasuke gave him a disbelieving look. "That's a tourist trap."

"Yeah, well," Naruto shrugged. "Jiraiya had me visit them. He said it would be a good experience, dealing with tiny pathways and having half a kilometer of rock over my head." He paused, and then added with a wide grin, "He _finally_ found a woman drunk enough or crazy or something to put up with him. He threw me out the whole time we were in that damn town, until they had this big fight and she stole his purse and disappeared. So I got stuck in those kinds of places a lot."

Sakura had to swallow quickly to keep from choking on her laughter. Sasuke rolled his eyes.

Naruto crammed the last bit of jerky into his mouth and quickly swallowed. "You know what, you've gotta come there with us," he told Sakura.

She shook her head. "I don't think that'll happen."

"Naw," Naruto said, waving her doubt off, "we'll get a mission into Earth country eventually. Then we'll just take the long way back and go by there."

"'The long way back'?" Sakura repeated, giving him a skeptical look.

Naruto pointed a thumb at Kakashi. "Sure! We'll just say we got lost or something, and that Kakashi-sensei rubbed off on us."

"Hey," the man replied.

Sasuke rolled his eyes again and looked out at the horizon. Sakura grinned, but still shook her head.

"I really doubt it'll happen," she said, leaning back slightly against the hillock. "All my missions stay in Fire country, remember?"

"Those were just . . . what, extenuating circumstances?" Naruto said. "Things are going back to normal."

Sakura looked down and bit off another piece of her jerky.

Naruto watched her for a few moments, tilting his head. "Why? Even if the hag is still annoyed now, it's not like that'll last forever."

"It's not that," Sakura said, with a small shake of her head. "It's . . . you know I've read a lot of the stuff that's come into the Hokage's office."

"So?"

"Some of that stuff . . . if I ever got captured. . . ."

Sasuke looked over again. Sakura took another bite of her food and chewed slowly; but when she was finished, Naruto was still staring at her, waiting.

She shrugged a shoulder and didn't look at him. "Well, if I get captured and there's no one close with a good possibility of rescuing me, I'm expected to commit suicide immediately. I know way too much; Konoha would be at severe risk if I broke and talked."

"The Hokage told you that?" Sasuke asked.

"Not really, not in words. . . ."

"That will never happen," Naruto said flatly. "I'll never let that happen."

Sakura smiled faintly and looked down again.

"It was my choice to snoop around," she said a moment later. "It could have been worse--she could have stopped teaching me. She let me keep getting away with it."

"It's not that she _let_ you," Sasuke replied, turning back to his food.

Naruto picked up on his emphasis a moment later. "It's that she couldn't really stop you from doing it anyway."

The three of them exchanged a look.

Naruto and Sakura both burst into snickers a moment later, and Sasuke looked away again with a half-smirk.

Kakashi lounged against the grass, watching the heirs to the legendary sannin carefully.

—

They each used an illusion to conceal their forehead protectors and weapon packs before stepping onto the road that led to Kamogaya, and mingled with another group of tourists entering the village. Sasuke used a larger illusion and changed the color of his hair.

An hour later, Kakashi had wandered along the main market area and collected information from several irate merchants about an increase in street urchin thefts in the past week and a half. Naruto and Sakura had gone with Sasuke to study the other area where Grassnins had been found dead, and then settled in a basic triangular formation around the market.

When Kakashi joined them and told Sakura the typical time when food would disappear from stalls, they shifted the formation to a square, and then sat down and waited. Kakashi kept half his attention on Sasuke; but the teenager, secreted in the space between a skylight and an awning on the hotel across from Kakashi's location, kept his face blank.

After forty minutes of waiting, wherein Kakashi had stretched all of his muscles carefully without moving too much and then started over again, beginning with his ankles, Sasuke shifted further into the space he was hidden in. Sakura, across from him, did the same, and when Naruto saw her move he echoed it. Kakashi shifted slightly, letting the shadows from the setting sun fall further over him.

Kakashi scanned the broad street, searching for a child or adolescent that looked furtive or otherwise likely to steal. He also studied several of the children running along the street that seemed to have absolutely no interest in their surroundings, and gave no inclination that they didn't have parents to take care of their meals.

It was in the latter group that he found the Soundnins, though first their own position was given away.

A bluebird, which had been quietly building a nest about two meters away from the place on the roof where Kakashi was located, suddenly dropped the grass in its mouth and began singing.

There was a shift from Sasuke's location, and then a shuriken left the bird a lump of bloody feathers. But by then a girl on the street had stopped and let out a shrill whistle. She managed to keep the noise up for a full second before two needles pierced her in the throat and a third one struck her in the back. Before she hit the ground, a boy who had been talking in a group a meter away grabbed her and began running out of the street. Seven more children scattered as well, in various directions.

_Nine--all of them?_ Kakashi had enough time to process, and then he was off the roof and chasing down the three that were running closest to him. Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura were already moving as well.

—

The three that Kakashi chased down weren't all one team--or at least, the two boys weren't. He never found out if the girl was teammates with either of them, because the taller boy shoved her to keep running and then the two stopped to fight him.

The taller boy used a scythe on a chain, and the shorter one a form of taijutsu that would have been potentially lethal, if it had flowed along with the first one's weapon. Even so, Kakashi got his arm slashed twice, and his back was barely spared a similar wound thanks to his vest, before he managed to disarm him and tangle the two up long enough to knock them unconscious. As soon as that was done, he grabbed them and rapidly ran out of the village, leaving a large amount of confused and shrieking people behind.

—

He met up with the others a quarter of a kilometer outside the village walls. Sakura had the girl with the needles in her throat thrown over her shoulder, and Sasuke had done the same with another boy. Naruto caught up with them a moment later, and he was gingerly carrying a second girl.

"Sakura-chan!" he called as soon as he was close enough to not have to yell too loudly. "Can you do something about her burns?"

Sakura let her breath out in a hiss when she saw the girl. "Let's get back to that hill."

They didn't take the road this time, and thus got there while the sun was still setting.

"What happened?" Sakura asked, dumping her girl beside Sasuke and kneeling next to Naruto's.

"One of the guys I was chasing threw a fireball at me," Naruto said. "I grabbed her while I was jumping back, but she caught the worst of it." He indicated his singed clothes.

Sakura pulled her medical kit out of her pack and started rummaging through it.

Naruto glanced over at Sasuke. "A really _big_ fireball," he added. "And he was a _small_ bastard, too; didn't come up to my shoulder, brown hair--"

"It doesn't matter if you describe him," Sasuke interrupted. He had dropped his boy as well, and had folded his arms as he watched Sakura work. "He'll have already changed by now."

Naruto frowned. "What?"

"His bloodline limit allows him to alter his DNA to resemble anyone he's managed to incorporate a sample of," Sasuke said unemotionally. "We won't find him."

Sakura whistled quietly at his first sentence, but didn't look up from the salve she was applying to the girl's face and arms.

". . . Who the hell **is** he?" Naruto demanded.

"My spare," Sasuke said. "I reached a point where I could land enough hits on Orochimaru that he acknowledged I might escape."

The complete blankness in his voice made even Naruto drop the subject.

Sakura finished applying the salve and had Naruto prop the girl up so she could quickly wrap her arms. Sasuke and Kakashi bound the other four children's hands, threading the rope around their fingers so they couldn't form any hand seals, and disarmed them while they were all still unconscious.

Sakura kept one eye on Sasuke as he removed the Soundnins' weapons, and noticed that none of the times did he take away that tiny, handleless blade she had seen him use before.

"Asshole," Naruto muttered to himself as Sakura taped a bandage over the worst part of the girl's face. "Treating his teammate like that. . . ."

"She isn't his teammate," Sasuke replied from where he was unstrapping a small knife from the ankle of the taller boy Kakashi had captured. "This one is. You missed the right girl--and she's the one that can summon birds."

"Screw you," Naruto snapped, "I was busy trying not to get set on **fire**."

"Guys," Sakura said flatly as she carefully maneuvered the girl's arms behind her back so Sasuke could tie her wrists and hands. Kakashi was removing the needles from the second girl's throat.

They stopped talking after that; and as soon as all five were tied up, Sakura took a small jar of liquid from her pack, poured several drops onto a cloth, and held it over the burned girl's nose and mouth. She repeated the process for the other four.

"That will keep them unconscious for several hours," she said as she put the bottle away. "I think we should get away from here and then use the time to sleep." She looked over at Kakashi, and he nodded.

—

They stopped at a copse of trees that was only a few hours from the Rain country border. Kakashi took the first shift, Sakura had the last, and she woke all of them up when the drug was close to wearing off.

"Why don't you just knock them unconscious again?" Naruto asked as he slung the boy Sasuke had caught over his shoulder.

"Later," Sakura replied, picking up the boy who'd had the scythe and the girl she'd hit with needles. "We have to feed and hydrate them first."

She asked Kakashi to carry the girl with the burns, because he had the most body mass to be able to drape her over his back without putting too much pressure on the wounds. Sasuke was left with the smaller boy of Kakashi's.

The girl with the burns regained consciousness first, while it was still dark. They paused for Sakura to reapply a little salve to her face and to force some water into her; and while that was going on, the boy Sasuke had been carrying began to stir.

Sakura made him drink as well, and then checked the other three. She seemed to have her doubts on whether the second girl was really still unconscious, but picked her up anyway.

Sasuke picked up the boy Sakura had also been carrying before she could. Then he hauled the boy he'd previously been carrying onto his feet.

"Walk," Sasuke told him. "If you try to run I'll slash your hamstrings."

The boy glared at him; but after he glanced around and saw that the rest of the children were still useless, he spat out, "Yes, Uchiha-sensei."

Sasuke shoved him in the back of the neck, and the boy started walking.

_. . . Well_, Kakashi thought as he watched Sakura and Naruto exchange glances, _fuck_.

—

By the time the sun had risen, all of the children had woken up, and they had noticed a raven was following them.

"Damn it," Naruto muttered, glaring up at the sky where the bird circled lazily. Sakura was struggling to make the boy who'd had the scythe drink. "Why don't you get rid of that thing?"

Sasuke was watching the sky as well, arms folded. "We'd just be throwing weapons away trying to hit it."

"Can't you hit it with a fireball?" Naruto asked

"Because sending that straight in the air _certainly_ won't give away our position."

"So use one of those damn snakes!"

Sasuke looked over at him. "Do you expect me to throw the snake at it, idiot? Get one of your frogs to catch it with his tongue."

"No, asshole, just summon a big snake. You **can** do that, can't you?"

"Sure," Sasuke replied, "if you don't mind me turning it loose on a town afterward."

Kakashi glanced over, and Naruto looked at the other teenager. "What?"

"Any snake bigger than a meter demands human sacrifices," Sasuke said.

Sakura narrowed her eyes as the boy with the scythe spit out another mouthful of water. This time she forced the neck of the canteen between his lips and used it to tilt his head back slightly, and then pinched his nose shut. He just started at her, and after a moment Sakura's features shifted to a blank expression. She didn't let go of his nose.

". . . liar," Naruto finally replied. "The viper that's attached to your hip is at least twice that."

"Kyomamushi is an exception. He doesn't demand anything."

Naruto made a half-hearted attempt at a snicker. "Of course not, the damn thing's in love with you."

Sasuke made a rude gesture at him without unfolding his arms.

Naruto looked back up at the sky. "The frogs'll bitch if I summon them just to attack that puny thing," he said.

"Then shut up," Sasuke replied, watching Sakura and the boy continue their standoff from the corner of his eye.

Naruto returned the rude gesture and then shaded his eyes, still watching the bird. "Think we'll lose it in the rain?"

Sasuke pulled a kunai from his pack. "Probably not. Even if we do, she'll just send another one once we're out of it." He threw the kunai behind him.

It grazed the boy's arm. He gasped reflexively, and then sputtered and started to choke as he inhaled the water. Sakura pulled the canteen away and slapped him once on the back before stepping over to the unburned girl. Sakura gave her an expectant look, and Sasuke pulled another kunai out.

The girl drank the water without making trouble. Kakashi tossed the kunai back to Sasuke, and he wiped it off and put it away.

—

They were almost within sight of the Rain country border when they were attacked.

It wasn't the work of the refugee Soundnins, Kakashi noted as he dodged a handful of shuriken and flung the scythe into one of the ninja's throats. He wrenched on the chain, ripping the weapon out, and was immediately confronted with another ninja. These were adults.

The ninjas that had attacked them were actually targeting the Soundnin children. The girl that Kakashi had been carrying was already dead, multiple kunai and shurikens embedded in her flesh. The ninjas were also conspicuously lacking forehead protectors.

_They're not that good_, he noted, and abandoned the scythe when it stuck into another of the attacker's ribs and wouldn't come out easily. _Chuunin level. No distinctive weapons, no distinctive hand seals_. It was only because they had come in such a large number--ten or twelve, possibly fifteen--that they had managed to split the team up.

_This was a suicide mission_, Kakashi realized, as he dodged three kunai to his shoulder and got close enough to break the arm of the ninja who'd thrown them. _They had to kill the children without giving their village allegiance away_.

He broke the right leg of the ninja as well, and then kicked him in the head hard enough to leave him temporarily unconscious. The rest of the ninjas in his area were dead, so he moved rapidly to Sakura's location.

Sakura wasn't comfortable fighting in such a wide open space, so she'd immediately used a genjutsu to create trees. Three of the four ninjas cancelled that, though, so she went with the next best move and had torn up the landscape until there were pits and chunks of rocks for her to work with.

When Kakashi arrived, he didn't see Sakura. Instead, he found one of the ninjas attacking his companions. The only really interesting detail about that was the fact that the man was bleeding considerably from a kunai jammed in his throat.

_A genjutsu . . . or did the Hokage teach her that_--

One of the ninjas dived at him, aiming a kick with a leg that already had two shurikan stuck in it. Kakashi caught it, twisted, and threw him to the side before attacking one of the others.

He had just swept the ninja's feet out from beneath her and slammed a kick into her chest hard enough that the crack was audible, when Naruto bellowed "**Sakura-chan**!"

Kakashi turned his head and saw five things at once. One, Sakura had concealed herself in a pit caused by the damage to the terrain; two, the ninja he had thrown aside had spotted her and had managed to wrap a wire around one of her legs; three, the ninja with the kunai in his throat was sliding forward to place himself between Sakura and the attacker; four, Naruto and two clones were diving at the attacker; and five, Sasuke had his katana out and was jumping over the huge clods of dirt to reach the area.

Kakashi threw two kunai into the back of the last ninja, who had been about to take advantage off all the movement to fling a few stolen shuriken at both Sakura and Sasuke. Past him, one of the Narutos threw another at the attacker. When the second Naruto ungracefully bodyslammed the man, the third one caught him before he could fall and threw him towards Sasuke.

The man hit the ground in front of Sasuke on his knees, and before gravity could pitch him forward, Sasuke had driven the katana into his heart. The teenager wrenched the sword to the right, tearing it out of the man's ribcage and gouging partly into his arm. Then he kicked the ninja in the chest, sending him backwards and dislodging him completely from the katana.

Sakura had already snapped the wire. One of the Narutos had attacked the ninja with the kunai in his throat, apparently not having noticed that the man was already dead. The ninja, now that Sakura's hands were no longer in a seal, was being thrown around like a rag doll.

No one else was moving besides the four of them. They each scouted the area anyway.

After several seconds passed and their adrenaline was slowing enough that they could be comfortable with the thought of the fight being over, Kakashi looked around more casually.

"I don't suppose any of you left one or two alive?" he asked.

Sasuke knelt next to one of the dead ninjas and began cleaning off his katana with their shirt. "No."

Sakura bit her lip as she unwrapped the wire from around her leg. "No . . . sorry." She finished untangling it from the torn cloth of her pants and pulling it out of the leather of her shin guards, and tossed it away. "They seemed so weak, and I had this jutsu I wanted to try . . . I didn't think."

"That's a spywork jutsu," Sasuke said, checking the blade for remainders of blood. "You shouldn't use it in a fight."

"I know, I know," Sakura said sheepishly, as she stood up and stamped her leg against the ground a few times. "It's my worst habit, wanting to try something. Tsunade-sensei says it's going to get me killed."

"Don't joke," Sasuke said flatly. He slid his katana back into its sheath. "I managed to keep one of the Soundnins alive," he added to Kakashi, jerking his head in the direction he'd come from.

"Same here," Sakura said, pulling the girl she'd attacked with needles--whom she'd knocked unconscious again--out of the pit.

The Naruto clones disappeared, and the real one scratched the back of his head. "Mine got killed," he said. "But I did leave one of these bastards alive!"

"Good," Kakashi told the three of them.

When he went back to the area he'd been fighting in, he found that the ninja he'd left alive hadn't stayed unconscious as long as he'd expected and had killed himself with a stray kunai. Kakashi sighed in annoyance and followed Naruto to where he said he'd pinned one of the ninjas.

Sakura was dragging the girl with her, and Sasuke had gone back to collect the smaller of the two boys that Kakashi had fought. They met up with Naruto and Kakashi just in time to find the last ninja dead from a kunai through the neck.

Sasuke snorted. "Next time, try pinning him through the foot instead of the throat."

Naruto was crouched next to the body and barely bothered to wave Sasuke off. "This isn't--I changed that jutsu, dammit! It was supposed to just hold him!"

Kakashi studied the corpse carefully. "Naruto . . . was this the Body Flicker jutsu?"

Naruto looked over at him. "Huh? How'd you--yeah, it was. But it wasn't supposed to kill him!"

"I don't think it can be modified the way you were trying," Kakashi told him.

Naruto glared at the ninja as if it were his fault for getting killed.

Sakura was carrying the girl under one arm, and picking up several shurikan with her free hand. "Were these Grassnins?" she asked, looking at Kakashi.

"Probably," Kakashi said. "But they made sure not to confirm it." He looked around one last time. "Pick up your weapons quickly--a cleanup group will be here soon."

Sakura and Naruto nodded, and began collecting more of the weapons. Sasuke tossed the boy he was carrying at Naruto and headed back to the area Sakura had been in before the blond could yell at him. Kakashi followed a few moments later, picking up the various kunai and shuriken strewn around on his way.

The raven was pecking at the earring of the boy who had had the scythe. Sasuke shooed it back and checked his pulse.

A moment later he pulled a kunai out of the boy's chest and used it to cut of a lock of hair. He tossed it at the bird.

The raven didn't deign to pick it up. "That ain't good enough."

Sasuke unfastened the earring that it had been pecking at and tossed it on top of the hair. Then he stood. "Go. And tell them to stay away."

The raven made a strange cawing noise that might have been a laugh. Sasuke slit his thumb on the edge of the kunai and said nothing.

The bird ruffled its feathers once, but picked up the hair and earring in its beak and began to fly off.

Sasuke slammed his hand against the ground, and a moment later two vipers appeared, one small and one large.

"Follow it," he told them, indicating the bird. "Keep Ichiro out of Fire country if he heads that way."

"Where's the please, brat?" the smaller viper said, but then Kyomamushi hissed. The smaller viper curled away.

"Fine," it said. "You want us to kill him?"

Kakashi watched Sasuke start.

Whether he would have said no or yes, or whether he would have hesitated, Kakashi wouldn't know. Kyomamushi said "It's getting away," and shoved the other viper with its head. The two of them took off through the grass.

By the time Sasuke had wiped the kunai off on the grass, his thumb off on the cuff of his pants, and turned around and started walking towards Naruto and Sakura, his face was set in its usual expression. He didn't look over at Kakashi.

They collected all the weapons they'd used, cleaned them enough to return them to their packs, and then took off toward the border before a second group could arrive.

——

Because the ninjas who'd attacked hadn't given away their village affiliation, Kakashi didn't want to ignore the slight chance that they had come from the Hidden Rain, a village which wasn't too far and which could better afford to throw away such a large group of shinobi on a suicide mission for whatever reason. He had the team jump the border instead of going through customs.

They stopped twice for fifteen minutes to eat and take care of other business, and once for twenty minutes to force water and one meal into the two remaining Soundnins. Even with the extra hour they added to skirt widely around the Hidden Rain, they had almost cut across the whole of the Rain country and were near the border of Wind country when they had to stop for the night.

The country lived up to its name. The area around the border had been soggy marshland, and they weren't far into the country before the path they were cutting ran through a lot of mossy undergrowth. A medium drizzle had started a few hours before the sun began to set.

They built a rough shelter out of brush and tree branches, which did very little to keep the rain off and absolutely nothing to make the ground any dryer. The girl Soundnin bitched about being stuck in the wettest corner until Sakura drugged her and the other one again.

Sasuke had the first shift, but he'd only been sitting up for twenty minutes when Naruto sat down next to him.

"Go to sleep," Sasuke said.

"Can't," Naruto replied. "It gets pissy whenever I use one of the Fourth's jutsus."

Sasuke glanced at him from the corner of his eyes. "That was one of the Fourth's?"

"Jiraiya taught it to me and Kakashi-sensei recognized it," Naruto said. "Whose else would it be?"

Sasuke nodded once in agreement, and Naruto added in a quieter voice, "Are you sure you want to do this?"

The other teenager didn't reply for a long time, and checked that Kakashi was really asleep before he did. "It's not like I can turn back now, idiot."

"That's not what I meant," Naruto said flatly. "These kids--you know them, don't--?"

"I don't care," Sasuke replied.

"But--"

"I don't care," he repeated, folding his arms. "A shinobi doesn't let his emotions interfere with his job. You might suck a lot less if you'd realize that."

"Yeah, yeah," Naruto muttered, "the mission is the most important thing, and a ninja is a tool without a heart, and that's all bullshit."

Sasuke didn't reply. Naruto watched him for a few minutes, and finally slouched forward slightly. "I know what's riding on this mission," he said. "But, still . . . are you sure you're okay?"

"I don't care," Sasuke said for the third time.

Naruto stared out at the drizzle and the undergrowth that they had stopped in for the night. Then he stretched and jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards the shelter. "I'm not gonna get to sleep for a while. Trade with me; I've got third shift."

Sasuke stood up and moved to the shelter, leaving him there.

——

The drizzle became a downpour by early afternoon. The bridge on the road to the Sand border was closed, and they were obliged to turn back and rent a room in a small village that was off the main road. They used an illusion to make the two Soundnins look like adults resembling Sakura and Naruto, which lessened the questions slightly. Locking themselves in the room and not leaving except when Kakashi gave Sakura his purse and asked her to bring back whatever passed for good food in the place really lessened the questions (at least the ones directed at them), but didn't do much for anyone's restlessness.

Sakura brought a deck of playing cards back with the boxed meals. She told Kakashi she'd reimburse him, but he said as long as it made Naruto stop pacing, it wouldn't be necessary. Sasuke said something to her as he helped pull the bentos out of the bag, but Kakashi didn't hear it over the noise they made setting the boxes down.

Kakashi wrung out his vest as best he could and loaned it to Sakura so she could let her shirt dry without having to wear only her fishnet and bra. She threw a chopstick at Naruto when he suggested they play strip poker since they were all half-naked anyway.

He left the room briefly when night fell, reusing the henge that concealed his mask and forehead protector, and bought a drink at the small bar beside the inn. The owner said that the rain looked like it was clearing up, and would be over before the night was done. When Kakashi asked whether the bridge would be open by then, the man said it was likely--they built bridges high in Rain country.

Kakashi went back to the room soon after, and broke up the poker game before the rounds could reach triple digits. He told them to get sleep now, since they'd be leaving before dawn. The Soundnins were already asleep in a corner, and Sakura said she had drugged them early so they'd stop interrupting the game.

Kakashi thought back to the words Sasuke had said to her that he couldn't hear, and didn't believe it.

He nodded, though, and a few minutes later nodded again when Sasuke said he would take first shift. He noticed that Sakura and Naruto's bedrolls had been set down between the window and his while he was shaving in the bathroom, but couldn't tell if Naruto was involved or if Sakura had just laid them out herself.

For the first half hour, Sasuke did nothing but sit by the window, watching the rain slacken and sharpening a few of his kunai and his katana. Kakashi let himself half-doze, his back to the teenagers.

But then Sasuke put the katana back in the sheath and opened the window, just a fraction, just enough that the rain was loud enough to partially cover a quiet conversation. Kakashi woke up fully, but kept his muscles relaxed and his breathing mimicking sleep.

Sasuke might not have noticed, or he might have. He made no indication either way.

"Hey," the girl said after the window had been open for a few minutes. "I'm thirsty."

There was the sound of rummaging, a canteen being opened, and bare feet on the wood floor. Sasuke only let the girl drink a few swallows before recapping the canteen and moving back to his previous seat by the window.

"They're going to torture us for information, aren't they?" the girl asked a minute later.

"Yes," Sasuke said.

The girl blew her bangs away from her face. Kakashi heard a few thumps against the floor soon after, and guessed that she was pushing herself up to a sitting position--probably using the wall, since her arms were tied behind her back.

"Is that bastard--" she broke off. "No, you wouldn't care."

"Kazuo is dead," Sasuke said.

There was a long pause. ". . . How did. . . ?" the girl asked suspiciously.

"I don't remember your name," Sasuke said, and his voice reverberated slightly as he glanced out the window, "but you were the girl that Kazuo was pretending to change his class records for."

"Pretending?"

"He wouldn't have lied to Orochimaru-sama for trash like you," Sasuke said without malice. "But he put in a request that you be kept out of the experiment cages for a few extra months."

The girl let out a long, shuddery breath. "Was fucking him for nothing . . ." she muttered. And then: "Did you tell Ichiro about that?"

"Why would you think that?" Sasuke asked neutrally.

Another pause. "The same night you disappeared, he showed up at my house and said he and his team were leaving, and I could come with him. I talked him into bringing the guys and asking if Isamu's team wanted to go." There was another pause, and Sasuke just looked at her. "They agreed, too . . . it wasn't really an offer you could turn down and live."

Sasuke 'ch'ed. "_That's_ why there were so many of you? I was wondering why he thought he could keep such a large group secret."

"It wasn't too hard . . . but then that other group showed up."

"He didn't invite them, too?"

She snorted. "Hell no, what, you thought we would believe we could take _fifteen_ people out of Oto? I don't know when they left, but we told them to stay away from us."

Sasuke brought a leg up and rested his arm on it. "It didn't work. You should have just kicked them out of the country or fled it."

She glared at him. "It wasn't that simple! The damn Hidden Grass had invited them, too, so we had to pretend we were all going to get along."

Sasuke took that important bit of news in stride. "'Get along'? Like any of you assholes have ever done that."

She scuffed her heel quietly along the floor at him, the closest to an insulting gesture she could make with her arms behind her and the noise restraint on their conversation. "_They_ didn't need to know that. We just had to keep them happy unt--"

She stopped suddenly, and Sasuke just looked at her again.

". . . If I tell you, and we get attacked again, will you let us die?" she asked.

"No," Sasuke replied. "My full reinstatement to the Leaf depends on this mission."

There was a faint thud as the girl leaned back against the wall. "Then I don't know anything," she said.

After a long pause, she added: "It was all Ichiro's plan from the minute we left, finding some normal work in other countries until things were settled and we looked old enough to get freelance work. We just went along since his team could beat all of us into the ground if they'd tried."

"Right," Sasuke said. He let his leg drop and settled into a cross-legged position, glancing out the window again.

He pushed the window open a little further, making the sound of the rain a little louder, before saying, "Tell the Sand that and they'll kill you relatively quick."

"Really are the soft one . . ." she snickered derisively, and then, "No. Isamu managed to escape."

"Ichiro will have already taken everyone to somewhere he knows you five wouldn't have thought about," Sasuke said. "A boy isn't worth getting tortured for. Give the Sand your old plan and take the quick death."

". . . I can still buy him some time to get further," she replied.

The other Soundnin, the boy, spoke for the first time. His voice was muffled because he didn't look up. "Stop acting like you give a damn, you fucking asshole."

When Sasuke didn't bother to reply, he continued. "Kazuo was your teammate, you traitor. All that bullshit you told us that day, I actually listened . . . I could have gotten away."

"Those four were never my teammates," Sasuke replied. "They were just people I worked with."

There was a scrape along the floor, and the boy's voice was no longer muffled. "Why are **you** getting away with this? We were **born** there. You **came**."

"Keep your voice down, idiot!" the girl hissed.

"Because my blood is worth more than yours," Sasuke replied.

"It's not **fair**!" the boy snapped.

This time, Sasuke's voice bordered on amused. "Where the hell are you from again?" he asked. "Life isn't _fair_."

"You--"

"Oh, shut **up**, Akino," the girl said. "Take it like a man."

The boy muttered several curses under his breath, until Sasuke closed the window. Then the three of them were silent.

Sasuke woke Sakura an hour later. Kakashi didn't fall asleep until he heard her drug the Soundnins and settle into place beside the window.

—

Now that he knew it had been the Hidden Grass behind the attack, Kakashi could have had the team cross through the border like normal--except that if the Hidden Rain checked the records, there would be no notice of them having entered the country. Kakashi decided to jump the second border and, if the question ever came up, say they looped through Fire country. The rainstorm had added enough time that it would be believable, and the guards stationed at the borders of every country knew to lie when their ninja village told them to.

They traveled through a hanging valley that dropped into the riverbed area which separated Rain from Wind, and met the team from the Sand on the other side of the river. They were shepherding one child and one man, the latter of whom had his throat wrapped with a swath of bandages.

"They attacked you, too?" the leader called as they approached. Kakashi nodded.

"He isn't talking yet," the man said, indicating the adult, and then jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the boy, "but this one told us that it was the Hidden Grass who sent them."

"Ha," Kakashi said, making his voice sound like he was grinning, "we could have taken the normal roads, then."

The other man shrugged a shoulder. "Better safe. . . . I figured the only way to work the timing would be to say we cut through Fire," he added.

When the two groups met up completely, Akino hissed "Coward" at the boy. The girl spit at the ground near him, causing one of the Sandnins to push the boy to the opposite side of himself, away from them. Sasuke ignored all three.

"That's what I was going to state as well," Kakashi said. "Should we say we met up in the Grass?"

The Sandnin leader nodded, and both the groups began the last leg of the trip, to Suna.

—

The Soundnins were driving Kakashi mad.

The two that his team had brought back were bullying the one the Sand had caught whenever they got the chance. The three of them threw insults at each other the entire time they were moving, they kicked or tripped him whenever they managed to get close enough, and when the group stopped to eat lunch, Akino kicked the food Sakura had been about to the feed the Sand's boy out of her hands. And Sasuke always seemed to have his back turned when something happened. Kakashi was not looking forward to the next day or day and a half.

Though, things had settled down somewhat after Sakura had punched Akino in the cheek and then refused to heal the broken bone. Now it was just the girl and the Sand's boy tossing insults back and forth, but they did it in quieter voices and only when Sakura was at least a meter away.

"Do something about them," Kakashi heard her whisper irritatedly to Sasuke.

He didn't reply to her demand until they set up camp for the night.

"Heh," Naruto said, looking up at the sky as he threw out his bedroll. "That bird's gone. And you said we wouldn't lose it in the rain."

"It didn't follow us into the country," Sasuke replied, eschewing an insult since the Sandnins were just to their left. "Didn't you pay attention?"

"Then what **did** happen to it?"

"She sent it to keep track of her teammate," Sasuke said, tossing his bedroll flat. "He got killed, so it went back. These ones don't mean anything."

"Fuck you too," the boy the Sand had captured muttered.

"Shut up, you son of a non-shinobi whore," the girl replied angrily. "You don't have the right to talk to us anymore."

"Children," Sasuke said, suddenly, in a voice that was thirty-seven years too old for him. "I've tolerated this for long enough. Behave properly."

Kakashi froze.

Naruto hissed at Sasuke under his breath. Sakura glanced at Kakashi before narrowing her eyes and glaring at him as well.

There was a long silence, and then the Sand's boy whispered, "I'm sorry."

"Be quiet," Sasuke replied, still using Orochimaru's voice.

After that, the Soundnins were as silent as if they were already dead.

Kakashi took first shift, along with one of the Sandnins named Komaza. About half an hour in, he noticed a movement from the area where the rest of his team was sleeping. He turned his head slightly and watched as Naruto rolled onto his opposite side, tossing his arms out as he did and punching Sasuke hard in the shoulder.

Sasuke scooted away slightly, and at that, Sakura stretched and kicked him in the shin with her heel.

Sasuke made a disgruntled noise and tucked his legs closer. Sakura yawned, keeping her back to him. Naruto snorted and shifted back onto his other side, and Sasuke stretched out enough to elbow him under his ribcage.

Kakashi couldn't help rolling his eyes.

—

A day later, they reached Suna a little before noon. The Sandnin team led the way to the jail.

The transfer went over relatively quiet--Kakashi and the Sandnins' leader did the talking--and since it was a delegated mission, the Sand was the one that would have to file the majority of the paperwork.

Behind him, Sakura asked one of the police who were transferring the Soundnins into handcuffs if she could speak to the medicnin in charge of the jail.

The officer gave her a confused look. "I don't think we have one of those . . . we just transfer the really sick ones straight to the hospital and keep a guard over them."

"Ah, no," Sakura clarified, "I meant. . . ." She pursed her lips, trying to find the right term. "The medicnin who will handle those four."

Sasuke tapped Naruto on the shoulder. "Let's go."

"Huh?" Naruto said, looking over at him. "Kakashi-sensei isn't done with--"

"Oh!" the officer said. "You mean the medicnin in charge of torture?"

After a brief start, Sakura clasped her hands behind her back and nodded. The officer left, and Sakura stared at the hallway he had gone through.

Naruto started to ask a question, and Sasuke kicked him subtly--but hard--in the heel. When the blond turned to glare at him, Sasuke had his hands in his pockets and was studying the papers that lined the wall next to them.

Kakashi had just finished scrawling out his notes on the Grassnins' attack and the claim of going through Fire country rather than Rain, when the officer returned with another man.

"Can I help you?" he asked, after the officer indicated Sakura.

She opened the pack on her leg, and a moment later removed a small, handleless blade. She held it out to the medicnin.

"I took this from the female Soundnin, but you need to search for these on the two males. We captured a couple spies from the Sound a few years ago, and these were so small that they didn't turn up when we despoiled them," she explained. "And while we were working on the first one, the second cut out her tongue and tried to sever her wrist before the blood loss killed her."

"Ah," the medicnin said, taking the blade from Sakura and eying it carefully.

Sakura paused briefly, giving Sasuke a chance to state where the blades were likely to be hidden. He continued to study the posters on the wall.

"Thank you," the medicnin said, giving her a quick nod. She returned it.

". . . Aren't you a little young to be trained in this area?" he added, raising an eyebrow.

Sakura just smiled and shrugged a shoulder.

Kakashi finally finished signing his name and set the pen down, before handing the paper to another officer. "Does that cover enough?"

He skimmed the notes and nodded. "This is sufficient. Thank you for your help with this mission."

"Thank you for contacting us on it," Kakashi replied, and then looked to his team. They headed for the door; and Kakashi overlooked the fact that Sakura deliberately stepped to the opposite side of Sasuke, keeping away from Naruto.

They were only a couple meters from the police station when someone started calling them. Kakashi turned to see a young man striding up.

He gave the whole group a quick but deep bow, and then explained: "The Kazekage has invited the four of you to lunch . . . if you haven't eaten already?"

Sasuke noticed Sakura tense beside him, but when he glanced to the side, her face was politely unreadable.

"Heeeey!" Naruto said, shouldering his pack and grinning. "Sure! Let's go!"

He glanced at Kakashi, who nodded. Sasuke and Sakura followed the two of them.

—

Gaara had changed in the past three years. It was harder to read his face now.

But, in Kakashi's opinion, unreadable was better than the homicidal look that had been there previously, so he kept his mouth shut and just ate. Sasuke wasn't prone to talking during meals, and Sakura--after politely thanking Gaara for the good food--didn't seem inclined to chatter either. That left Naruto to carry the conversation, but neither he nor Gaara seemed to mind.

All of them had finished eating over ten minutes ago, but Naruto was still in the middle of one of his stories, while Gaara was listening with an expression Kakashi would have almost called a bemused smile.

Kakashi hadn't heard this one before, and was wondering how the hell Naruto and Jiraiya had managed to do so much within less than a year and a half--and when they had actually had time to train. And why they hadn't been arrested at least a dozen times over. But, considering that the story involved a bordello, at least he was no longer wishing it was appropriate to read at a kage's dinner table.

"So _then_," Naruto continued, using his chopsticks for emphasis, "the bastard uses an illusion and suddenly I can't tell him from all the other women running around and screaming their heads off--and that pervert sannin was still nowhere to be found. And **damn**, but it was noisy! Women scream so freaking _loud_."

"Oi," Sakura said.

"Well, it's true!" he defended, turning to look at her. Then Naruto finally noticed that everyone else was done, too. He set his chopsticks on the plate.

"Were you planning to stay a night here, or to head back immediately?" Gaara asked.

Kakashi sat up slightly. "It would probably be better if we leave today--we were already thrown off our expected time because of that rainstorm."

Gaara looked at Sasuke, who looked back impassively. Then he nodded once and stood up.

"Oh, hey," Naruto said as he shoved his chair under the table, "there was something else I needed to tell you. Do you have anywhere private?"

"Yes. Ask someone to take you to my office," Gaara told him. "I'll be there immediately."

"'My office,'" Naruto repeated as they started to leave the room. He pointed a finger at Gaara over his shoulder. "I'm gonna be saying that one day too, so don't be gloating about getting there first!"

"I wasn't . . ." Gaara started to say, but Naruto was already out the door.

He dropped the sentence and instead said: "Sakura. Sasuke."

They both turned. Kakashi paused just outside the door.

". . . Thank you," Gaara told them. "For what you did for him."

For a moment, a genuine smile almost curved on Sakura's lips. But then she bowed and said "Thanks," and started to leave. Kakashi moved out of the way, and Sasuke faintly nodded before leaving as well.

When they were almost at the courtyard of the Kazekage's tower, Sasuke said quietly, "It would be easier to claim his debt if you acted like you could stand being in the same room with him."

"He tried to kill Lee," Sakura said flatly and just as quietly.

"He tried to kill all of us," Sasuke reminded her.

"I could have forgiven that," she replied. "Lee did, I know that. If it had just been me, I could forgive. . . ." Her fingers curled up slightly. "But he **crippled** him. If . . . if Tsunade-sensei had refused to come back to Konoha. . . ."

Sakura seemed to notice her hand then, and uncurled her fingers and didn't continue.

Sasuke could have mentioned that it had been Lee's own decision to use a forbidden jutsu in his fight against Gaara, but he wasn't hypocritical enough to interfere in other people's hatred. Kakashi felt the subject would be better discussed out of Suna.

—

It barely took a quarter of an hour for Naruto to meet up with them again.

"You were right," he told Sakura once they were past Suna's walls. "He told me they'd found a spy that had been brainwashed by one of Akatsuki several months ago. They've been on watch since then."

She started to nod, but Kakashi stopped dead.

"What?" he said, looking at the two of them. "Akatsuki has been hunting Gaara, too?"

Naruto nodded. "He said that's what it looks like."

Kakashi focused on Sakura. "And you suspected that they were targeting more than one of the bijuu?"

Sakura gave him a confused look. "'Bijuu'?"

Kakashi eyed the three teenagers around him, and then glanced at the walls of Suna before looking back at Sakura. "What was it you were right about?"

She shifted on her feet slightly. "There . . . a few months ago, Tsunade-sensei had these coded letters from the Sand on her desk. Most of the translations I did were pretty mangled, but I got that it was something about Gaara and Akatsuki . . . until she started taking them home with her," Sakura added. "And when I mentioned it to Naruto, he told me about that badger demon."

Kakashi wanted to ask if she was _trying_ to get Tsunade to reject her as a student, but now the question had more meaning that it would have had fifteen minutes or an hour ago. "Ah," was all he said.

"What are bijuu?" Naruto asked.

Kakashi pursed his lips, enough that it was visible beneath the mask. ". . . You'll have to ask Tsunade-sama to tell you," he finally said, and started moving again. Sasuke fell in pace behind him, and Sakura once again moved so that he was between her and Naruto.

She frowned even as she did so. "What? Kakashi-sensei, why?"

"I don't have the authority to tell you," he replied.

"But--"

Naruto cut her off. "I get it," he said. He looked over at Kakashi. "But why's she still pretending there's a point to keeping this secret, now?"

"There was more to it than just the fox demon," the man explained vaguely.

Naruto let out a low, irritated breath, but didn't push it.

——

Sakura had first shift that night. As soon as Naruto was certain that Kakashi and Sasuke were both asleep, he got up and sat down next to her.

She wouldn't look at him, so Naruto stayed where he was and didn't speak. It wasn't easy, but it helped that he couldn't figure out what was the right thing to say until she explained.

It took several long minutes of silence, but finally Sakura shifted into a cross-legged position and folded her hands on her lap. She still didn't look over.

"I told you . . ." she said quietly. "There were . . . there's some things that you wouldn't like me for anymore."

"I think some of the jerk's stupidity has worn off on you," Naruto replied, and she tensed. A moment later, he elbowed her arm gently until she finally glanced at him.

"I told you," Naruto replied, looking her in the eyes, "nothing could make me hate Sakura-chan."

She blinked.

About half a minute later, Sakura finally looked away. She pulled her legs up to her chest and draped her arms over her knees, and stared out at the dunes on the horizon.

"You should get some sleep," she said. "Your turn is next."

Naruto rolled his eyes. "_Really_ worn off," he said with a smile as he stood up.

She smiled slightly in reply, but kept her face forward.

——

Things were mostly normal for the rest of the trip, until Naruto began acting oddly a few hours after they started moving on the second day.

"What is it?" Kakashi called after the teenager had glanced behind him for the twelfth time.

". . . it's nothing," Naruto said.

Kakashi raised his visible eyebrow.

"I have the feeling we're being followed," Naruto explained.

Sakura glanced behind her, and then over at him. "I don't sense anyone."

"Me neither," Sasuke replied a moment later, after checking.

"I can't smell anyone but us," Kakashi said.

Naruto nodded. "Yeah. Okay."

He didn't sound convinced, though; and Kakashi noticed that he was still glancing behind and beside him as they moved, just a little more subtly now.

Finally Kakashi tugged his mask down enough that his nose wasn't covered. He felt the usual flash of irritation when he flinched reflexively at the sudden increase of sensory input, but checked the air.

"There's nothing out here," Kakashi said, pulling the mask up again. "Just us."

Naruto nodded, and stopped looking around.

——

Naruto had the second watch that night. When he traded off with Kakashi, he waited for several minutes after he was certain the man had fallen asleep before shaking Sakura awake. He hesitated a second before waking Sasuke up as well, by kicking him in the soles of his shoes.

He motioned for them to follow him, and they settled in a tree that was far and high enough they wouldn't be overheard, but still close enough that they could see Kakashi and anyone who would have been coming up to him.

"Make a barrier," Naruto said when Sasuke landed on the branch.

Sasuke reflexively gave him an irritated look for the order, but did so. He had to borrow several of Sakura's kunais to seal off the space below them as well as around and above, and told them not to let their feet dangle.

A few minutes later, he eyed the kunai jammed into the trunk above Naruto's head. "The angles are too awkward. A strong attack will break it."

"Can anyone hear us?" Naruto asked.

"No."

"Then it's good enough. We're being followed," Naruto told them. "By foxes."

They didn't even get a chance to speak. Naruto shook his head at their looks. "I swear--he says they're there. He says they're invisible, that's why nobody can see them. I can't, either, but I can kind of feel them."

"It," Sakura said quietly.

"Right," Naruto said. "It. Yeah. It says they've been following us pretty much since we left the Sand."

Sakura made a small hand motion. "But . . . invisible foxes? Like . . . what, like a genjutsu?"

Naruto shook his head. "I don't think a genjutsu would last this long. Or if it did, wouldn't you or Kakashi-sensei have noticed by now? And, hell, it's only been us--there hasn't **been** anyone to catch me in one. They're _real_, they're just. . . ."

"Do you mean fox spirits?" Sasuke said.

Naruto scratched his head. "Maybe?"

"Well, **ask** whether they're real or spirits."

"Don't just say that like it's easy!" Naruto snapped at him. Sasuke didn't change his expression.

A moment later Naruto snarled something under his breath and pulled a leg up to his chest. He rested his arm on his knee and hid his face behind it.

Sakura and Sasuke waited. Sakura kneaded her fingers against the old bark of the tree. Sasuke kept a hand near the pack containing his shurikens.

". . . He says they're kitsune-tsukai," Naruto said a few minutes later. He looked at Sasuke. "What are kitsune-tsukai? He's being insulting about them."

Sasuke frowned. "Are you sure?"

"Yes I'm fucking sure," Naruto answered.

"They're. . . ." Sasuke shifted to a sitting position, still frowning as he tried to remember old information. "Chartered fox spirits," he said. "They're supposedly bound to a person who can control them and give them orders. A kitsune-mochi," he said, recalling the term.

Naruto snorted slightly. "Where did you learn all this junk?"

"I made Tayuya tell me everything she knew about foxes when I learned about you," Sasuke replied.

Naruto's fingers curled slightly.

". . . That was useful," Sakura ventured.

"It was like eating glass," Sasuke said. "They shouldn't be here. All onmyouji and animal spirit users were practically exterminated decades ago."

". . . oh! Right!" Sakura said. "That was mentioned in our history class. Before the Great Ninja War started, they were cleared out first. It was . . . Lightning country they evacuated to, since it doesn't border any of the other major ninja countries."

Sasuke gave her a sideways look. Naruto blinked.

"You remember stuff from that far back?" he asked.

"It was interesting," Sakura said in her defense. ". . . And Iruka-sensei said he would include it on one of the tests."

Sasuke and Naruto just stared at her. Sakura made an annoyed face. "Well, I didn't remember it until Sasuke used onmyoujutsu during the surgery! I went and looked it back up after that."

Naruto looked like he wasn't sure whether to laugh or call her a nerd. Sasuke just glanced back at Kakashi.

"It's illegal to use that kind of majutsu in _any_ of the countries," she added. ". . . I think even Lightning forbids it, since it's so dangerous to others?" She looked at Sasuke. He shrugged a shoulder to show he didn't know that much.

Naruto frowned. "Then why are they here? Who would be able to. . . ."

_Akatsuki_.

The three of them were silent for a few moments.

"So now what?" Naruto asked, looking at Sakura.

"We should get back to Konoha as fast as possible," she said. She glanced at Sasuke. "Can the foxes do anything to us?"

Sasuke still had his face turned away. "I can't think of anything," he said after considering it.

Sakura pushed herself into a crouch. "Then, we're only half a day away. Let's wake Kakashi-sensei up and run for it."

Sasuke started pulling the kunais free, breaking the barrier.

—

Kakashi didn't look entirely believing of their explanation--especially since magic users had been dispelled from Fire country before even _he_ was old enough to go on the battlefield--but he was willing to believe that there was someone out there chasing Naruto. And when it came to Akatsuki, frankly, anything went.

He said as long as they stopped so he could catch a fifteen minute nap around dawn, they could make it back to Konoha by late morning.

——

They were half an hour from Konoha when they were attacked again. The ninjas still lacked forehead protectors, but this time they used hand seals common to the Hidden Grass, and some were carrying scythes.

Some of the chuunin looked weary, and Kakashi suspected they had been running all the way from Kusa. Other of the chuunin looked scared, and Kakashi learned why ten minutes in.

There were three groups of four, each which approached from different angles. The groups had been poorly put together--there were imbalances of taijutsu and ninjutsu users in each one. There were also two jounin leading the groups, and another man (who probably would have been a jounin if he'd had the time to polish his skills and tactics) leading the third; and when it became obvious that they were going to lose, they started killing off their chuunins in the midst of fighting the four of them.

Kakashi was both glad and annoyed to have his team underestimated. The Grassnins' tactic of overwhelming them with numbers was automatically nullified because of Naruto's presence. If he had been more tired . . . if Naruto hadn't managed to regain enough chakra control that he wasn't draining his stamina with the smallest tasks . . . if Sakura had still been in unfamiliar terrain . . . then there might have been trouble.

Kakashi was old enough to prefer a quick slaughter to a straining fight, but he didn't like being held up by such sloppy planning. If he had had the time, he would have been irritated.

He didn't have the time because Sasuke had disappeared--_Allowed himself to be separated from the rest of us_, Kakashi corrected--with the almost-jounin.

Kakashi noticed from the corner of his eye that Naruto used the Body Flicker jutsu to pin one of the chuunin before joining Sakura, who was trying to keep the second jounin from killing off the rest of the chuunins. Then Kakashi's attention was distracted by the first jounin, who had recognized him.

Sometimes it sucked to be famous, Kakashi thought to himself, as he dodged a scythe.

Despite the imbalance of power between the Grass and the Leaf, the jounin **were** still jounin. The fight was messy, and everyone was bleeding by the end, even if Naruto healed quickly enough that it wasn't very noticeable.

"_Damn!_" the blond swore as he stared down at the dead chuunin. He started to run a hand through his hair before remembering there was blood on it. "Maybe if I shift that last seal. . . ."

"This one's going to die," Sakura said, examining the jounin that she and Naruto had been fighting.

"Well, there's still this one," Kakashi said, pointing a thumb at the jounin he had pinned down with wires and the chain of the scythe. He wanted to scan the area for Sasuke, but as long as the Grassnin was conscious, he wouldn't risk looking away.

When Sasuke did rejoin them soon after, he had the sense to announce his presence loudly. Since Naruto and Sakura were picking up weapons, it was a wise choice.

Sasuke was dragging the almost-jounin. Kakashi noticed that the man was unconscious, that there was hardly a mark on him, and that Sasuke's eyes were in the sharingan.

Before he could say anything, Naruto pointed a finger at the other teenager. "Don't run off on us!"

"I had to separate this one from the others," Sasuke replied, letting the Grassnin drop.

Beside Kakashi, Sakura knelt next to the jounin. He took advantage of her presence to shift his gaze to Sasuke.

"You can do that jutsu in a group, too," he said, "as long as you have someone to keep watch as you do."

"Who else is coming?" Sakura asked the jounin.

Sasuke glanced at Kakashi without turning to face him. "With this many attackers, we couldn't afford to have half the group be still for several seconds."

Kakashi pressed his lips together and gave the teenager an annoyed look.

Naruto moved to slap the back of Sasuke's head, but Sasuke shifted away. "Bastard, next time wait until we've thinned them out more and then do whatever you did. Just tell us beforehand so we can watch your back."

Sasuke folded his arms. "**Announce** an attack? Braggart."

"Don't twist my words, asshole."

There was a crack, and the jounin let out a short, sharp scream. Kakashi, Sasuke, and Naruto turned to look.

"Who else is coming?" Sakura repeated.

She gave the jounin ten seconds to reply, and then broke his other thumb. The man screamed again through clenched teeth.

Sakura shifted into a crouch, folding her arms casually on her knees. "Thumb breaks are the worst of all the fingers," she told the Grassnin. "If you won't talk to me, we're going to have to carry you back to the Leaf, and those bones will jar with every jump."

She pushed on his forehead, tilting his head up so that he was forced to look at her. "If I re-fuse the bones in the wrong alignment, you're never going to be able to form hand seals or hold weapons properly again," she said in an easy tone. "Your use is over. Who else is coming?"

When the man didn't reply after another ten seconds, Sakura let his head drop and reached for his right pointer finger.

"Let me try," Sasuke said, eyelids lowered halfway.

Sakura gave him a curious look, but pulled her hands back and pushed the jounin towards him. Kakashi folded his arms.

Sasuke hauled the Grassnin up by his vest collar, and punched him once. The man jerked his head back up, glaring at Sasuke--and then froze.

When Sasuke let go of his collar a few seconds later, the man sank to the ground. Sasuke frowned.

Sakura crouched next to the man again and looked at Sasuke, who was now staring at the almost-jounin. She cleared her throat quietly; and when he made a small hand motion, she looked to the Grassnin. "Who else is coming?"

"Just us," the man said in a hollow voice.

Sakura appeared startled, but it didn't show in her voice. "Where are the people you had to report to at?"

The man didn't answer, so Sakura broke the question down. "Were you to report our deaths?"

"Yes," the man said in that same voice.

"Where are they at?"

The man hesitated.

"Answer her," Sasuke said, walking over to the almost-jounin.

". . . Just inside the border," the man said.

Sakura nodded. "They can't reach us before we get back, then." She started to reach into her medical pack.

Sasuke glanced over again even as he picked up the second man. "I can't guarantee he's telling the truth," he warned.

Naruto moved to help, and Sasuke started dragging the man forward before the blond could reach him.

"He is," Sakura replied. "It's the tone." She pulled out the small bottle of liquid she had been using on the Soundnins and checked the amount left. "How did you _do_ that?" she added, raising an eyebrow at him. "It takes hours on seasoned men."

"I convinced him of the hopelessness of his situation," Sasuke said, making an irritated noise when Naruto grabbed the man's feet and yanked them up with a glare, leaving both of them a little unbalanced for a second. "If it would have taken you hours, why start now?"

Sakura pulled the cloth away from the man's face. "I was going to break his main fingers and leave him conscious until we reached Konoha. That could make him more likely to talk once we got there."

"Crass," Sasuke muttered as he dropped the other man's shoulders beside her. Naruto let go of his feet as well.

"It's not pretty work," Sakura retorted, quietly, as she packed the bottle and cloth away.

"Will you do me a favor?" Sasuke asked, looking at her. "Compare the chakra flow of these two."

". . . Okay," she said, resting a hand on the jounin's forehead. Kakashi tried to catch Sasuke's eyes, but the other teenager had folded his arms and was staring resolutely at Sakura. A moment later, though, he sat down beside the second Grassnin. Naruto watched him from the corner of his eyes.

Sakura shifted her fingers lightly over the man's forehead. "The damage is pretty centered, but it's deep . . . I can't believe you managed to make him speak so quickly."

Sasuke rubbed the heel of his hand against his temple, closing his eyes. "I told you, I used the mangekyou to overwhelm him with the knowledge he couldn't escape. It was one of. . . ."

Sasuke didn't finish the sentence, and rubbed his temple again.

Kakashi began to wish he had brought his headache medicine with him. He didn't take it on missions because it made him drowsy, but it wouldn't have been an issue in this case.

It probably would have been better if Sasuke had fallen asleep, actually. Easier.

Sakura pulled away from the first Grassnin and moved to the second one, the almost-jounin. She rested her hand on his forehead.

And a second later, she jerked back so quickly that she wound up sitting on the grass. Sasuke opened his eyes and looked at her.

". . . God, why didn't you just _kill_ him?" she finally managed to hiss.

"You can't get information out of a dead man," he replied.

"You can't get anything out of a braindead one, either!" Sakura snapped, gesturing at the man.

"It'll wear off," Sasuke said.

When Sakura continued to glare at him, he added, "Why are you giving me that look? He's just an _enemy_. It doesn't matter if he suffers."

Sakura grit her teeth. "Keep your mouth shut," she bit off. "We haven't put up with so much shit just so you can screw your life up yourself."

Sasuke only continued to give her that faint smirk, so she threw in: "If you really don't want to be here, you should have stayed away back then--dammit, life was hard enough without all the trouble you brought!"

Sasuke looked to the side. "So _should_ I have taken you with me?"

Sakura flinched.

Kakashi was about to break them up, but Sakura didn't give him a chance. "Don't **ever** bring that up again," she said coldly. "I'm not that stupid anymore."

"Neither am I," Sasuke snapped, jerking around to glare at her. "So stop acting like it. I chose weeks ago."

"**We** know that," she retorted, "but **we** aren't Konoha. You still have to prove it."

"How fucking much is she going to demand?" Sasuke growled under his breath. "Tell me, how am I supposed to make her stop seeing Orochimaru when she looks at me?"

". . . Just endure it," Sakura said, suddenly sounding weary. "She's fifty-three. You're fifteen."

Sasuke looked away again, and a moment later pressed the heel of his hand back to his temple.

When the two of them were silent for a few seconds, Kakashi folded his arms. Before he could find the right words to begin with, however, Naruto crouched down.

"Hey," he said, and Sakura looked over. Sasuke kept his back to him.

"Both of you, shut up," Naruto said. "You know Kakashi-sensei has to report all of this."

He glared at Sasuke's back until the other teenager shrugged a shoulder. Sakura looked down at the second Grassnin.

"That could be a good thing," she said a moment later. ". . . After all, aren't people starting to worry that our team is getting too close? Kakashi-sensei."

Kakashi took a second to make his voice even before answering. "Somewhat."

Naruto gave him a disbelieving look. "How can you have a team be too close?"

Sasuke snorted quietly. Sakura thumped him on the arm before pressing her hand back to the second Grassnin's forehead.

About a minute later, she pulled it away. "The damage here. . . . Did you deliberately focus the genjutsu you used on the other one?" she asked, rubbing her hand roughly against her pants.

Sasuke partially looked over, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "No."

She frowned. "Then, what? Did you use two variations of the same jutsu?"

Sasuke smiled.

"Thank you," he said, standing up. He picked up the almost-jounin and didn't answer her question.

Kakashi picked up the first Grassnin and told the team to move quickly, on the chance that the man had been lying.

—

It only took three minutes for it to be obvious that something was really wrong with Sasuke. He was only jumping to large, wide branches, and he was using more chakra than necessary.

At seven minutes, Sasuke started wobbling with each landing. After the third time, Naruto grabbed the Grassnin off of Sasuke's back when he jumped past the other teenager. Sasuke remained on the branch for an extra second until he adjusted to the change in weight, and said nothing.

Kakashi heard Sakura drawn in a quiet breath at that; and she subtly shifted into a position behind Sasuke. Naruto was already keeping pace beside him.

At a moment when the guys were both in front of them, Sakura made a small motion with her hand, and Kakashi looked over. She gave him a curious look and tapped near her eye. Kakashi nodded.

Sakura rolled her eyes, but then Sasuke skidded slightly on the smooth bark of the tree he'd bounced off of, and she turned her attention back to him.

—

Sasuke almost made it back to Konoha. Kakashi was both impressed and disturbed--he could feel the teenager's chakra fading with each jump.

They were nine minutes away when Sasuke wasn't able to push enough chakra into the soles of his feet to stick to the branch. He didn't help things by landing too close to the edge instead of in the middle.

"Not the arm!" Sakura yelled to Naruto, when he jumped to catch Sasuke. She darted to grab the Grassnin that Naruto had let go of.

Naruto quickly released Sasuke's arm before he dislocated the shoulder and caught him around the waist instead. They wound up dangling awkwardly for a moment, since Naruto had only managed to get one foot stuck to the underside of a branch, until Sasuke kicked him in the chest and forced Naruto to drop him.

Sasuke activated the curse seal before he hit the ground.

"Asshole!" Naruto snapped as he dropped to the ground beside him, and rubbed at the spot on his chest where Sasuke's boot had caught him.

Sakura and Kakashi landed nearby. Sasuke immediately backed away.

Sakura took a step forward. Sasuke took two more steps back.

She held up her hands. "Just let me look at it, Sasuke."

"You can't do anything," he replied. "I can make it back if we don't waste time."

"I can try to--"

Sasuke interrupted her. "I used the mangekyou so extensively on that one Grassnin that it shifted the level of the illusion up. My chakra system is trying to add extra connections to my eyes." He jerked a thumb at his shoulder. "This is going to make it worse. Don't waste time."

"_Damn_ it! Dumbass!" Naruto clenched his hands into fists. "If you pull this crap again--"

"Don't worry," Sasuke replied. "This is as far as I can go on my own."

Kakashi disliked the way he phrased that sentence.

"Then we'll take a break," Sakura said. She dropped the Grassnin on the ground. "Even if he's lying, we'll just fight them off."

Sasuke was starting to shift on his feet, impatient. "If I pass out, I'm not going to be able to wake up for a long time. You're so worried about appearances--how will it look if you carry me into the village unconscious after _this_ mission?"

Sakura shoved her bangs back, and opened her mouth. It looked like she changed her mind at the last second, and instead said, "Then we'll **wait**. We're off schedule already, it won't matter."

"Are the foxes still out there?" Sasuke asked, turning his head slightly in Naruto's direction without looking away from Sakura.

Naruto used several choice curses on him and said "Yes."

"Then let's go," Kakashi said. He shouldered the Grassnin he was carrying, ignoring the man's reflexive whimper when his broken hands brushed against the front pockets of Kakashi's vest. Sakura let out a breath between her teeth, and picked up the other Grassnin.

"Come on," Naruto said irritatedly to Sasuke. He jumped onto a branch, looking over his shoulder.

Kakashi noticed that Sasuke watched the jump and waited for Naruto to move off the branch before jumping to the exact same spot.

—

When they reached the gates, Kakashi continued to focus a faint amount of chakra in the soles of his feet even as they jumped to the ground and began walking normally. He wasn't surprised when Sasuke, after using a henge to hide his eyes, soon fell in step behind him.

_He can't see normally right now_, Kakashi noted. _Or he can only see chakra_.

They made it to the jail without trouble, and in the middle of the transfer paperwork Tsunade herself showed up. She brushed the officer out of the cell and examined the first Grassnin. She started to raise an eyebrow when she saw his hands, but then changed her mind and astutely avoided glancing at Naruto.

"Should we try to brace the fingers?" Sakura asked.

Tsunade examined them. "There's not much point--it sustained too much damage during the trip. How much of the ether did you give it?"

"The remains of the bottle . . . about two milligrams."

Tsunade nodded, and then moved toward the second Grassnin. "How much did you give this one?"

"Ah," Sakura said quietly.

"Nothing," Sasuke replied. "I used a genjutsu on him; he hasn't regained consciousness from that yet."

Tsunade pursed her lips slightly, and pressed a hand to the Grassnin's forehead. A moment later, she raised both eyebrows before looking over at Sasuke.

"Do you have an idea how long it'll take _him_ to wake up?" she asked dryly.

Sasuke surprised everyone in the room by clasping his hands in front of him and bowing from the waist. "I apologize for that," he said. "I used the mangekyou sharingan and miscalculated how it would affect a normal person."

". . . I see," Tsunade said after a moment. She turned back to the Grassnin. "What part of the chakra system does that genjutsu attack? A simple flow disruption isn't changing anything, and it's different from the last time I saw it."

"I'm sorry," Sasuke repeated, without shifting position, "that's a clan secret."

Tsunade gave him an unreadable sideways look.

Kakashi reminded himself that shaking sense into a person had a zero percent success rate, and restrained the urge. He was mildly glad that Naruto was on the other side of the group.

"Very well," Tsunade said a moment later. "After you write up the report and turn it in, you're free to go."

"Tsunade-sensei?" Sakura said quietly. When the woman looked at her, she tugged slightly on the sleeve of Naruto's jacket. "We need to tell you something. Privately."

Tsunade frowned slightly, but jerked her head at Kakashi. "Go clear the hallway."

"Should I get Shizune?" he asked, resolutely not looking at Sasuke, who had had to shift his footing to catch himself when he straightened up.

Sakura nodded, and Tsunade agreed.

She didn't say anything when Sasuke followed Kakashi out of the cell, but that might have been because Naruto had already caught her attention with: "Don't kill me, okay? It talked to me first."

—

Sasuke leaned against the wall as Kakashi spoke to the officers. He could tell that the teenager was using as little of the curse seal as possible, and it wasn't visible because of the high collar of his shirt, but a few of the better officers were giving his shoulder and Kakashi's feet oblique looks.

When they were in the front hallway and no one was close enough to hear, Kakashi said, "I didn't think she was going to let you get away with that."

"I must have passed," Sasuke replied.

"You can't maintain secrecy forever, Sasuke. You don't have the kind of power to keep the Hokage out of your clan's issues anymore."

"I already told Naruto most of it," he said. "When he's Hokage, he can write down."

Kakashi looked over at him, but there was no sign of sarcasm in Sasuke's voice or on his face.

_Is that why he was talking so freely. . . ?_ he wondered. He had assumed Sasuke had been sharing information in order to see how much he would report back.

"You shouldn't wear your loyalties so obviously," Kakashi told him, as he held the door open. "It's dangerous."

Sasuke made a noise in the back of his throat and pushed the other door open. When Kakashi gave him a look, he said, "I can see. It's just blurry."

"Ah," Kakashi replied, and didn't release the chakra in his feet.

He hoped Sasuke was telling the truth, because when he started toward the hospital, the teenager broke aside and turned down another street, walking away from him as quickly as he could manage.

—

Shizune nodded at his message and quickly transferred the care of the patient she'd been working on over to another doctor before departing for the jail. Kakashi went to track down Sasuke.

It was easier than he had expected, because Sasuke had kept close to the walls of buildings and even brushed against them at times.

When he came to the juncture that would have led to the teenager's apartment, Kakashi was startled to find that Sasuke had turned left instead.

He followed Sasuke's scent down the streets until he reached his own apartment, let out a sigh when he found his lock had been kicked in, and entered to find Sasuke collapsed a quarter of a meter into his front room.

The viper was there as well, curled loosely around him, and Sasuke had pressed his forehead and eyes against the cool scales.

Kakashi started to step closer, and the snake flicked out its tongue. He paused.

"He's sick," Kakashi said a moment later.

"No shit," Kyomamushi replied.

The snake opened one eye, watching him. "Have you dealt with obsessed people much, dog-summoner?" it asked. "The thing that they're obsessed with is the smallest piece in everything they do. If even the fox couldn't make him let go, did you really think you had a chance?"

". . . I was talking about his eyes," Kakashi said carefully.

The viper flicked its tongue out again. "So was I."

Kakashi decided it wasn't going to leave Sasuke to attack him without provocation, so he crouched to get closer to its eye level. "I need to get a medicnin to look at him."

"It won't help," the snake replied. "He's doing this to himself--the activation of the mangekyou depends on death. The knowledge that the fox is still alive is what's killing him, not his eyes . . . and he knows it."

"Shut up," Sasuke said suddenly. His voice was muffled by the snake's scales.

Kakashi glanced at him.

"Someone needs to tell them before you destroy yourself, kid. I told you to let the fox die, but you--"

"Shut _up_." Sasuke shifted slightly, as if he were struggling to push away.

The viper draped itself over his back, pinning him, and Kakashi thought uncomfortably of boa constrictors. The snake curled around enough to look at him again.

"If you really want to help, kill the fox," it said. "There's nothing else you can do."

"Ah," Kakashi said neutrally. He made a small, testing motion towards Sasuke, but the viper just continued to stare at him. Kakashi paused again.

"Is there anything else I should know?" he asked after a moment, and watched Sasuke's hand twitch.

The viper flicked out its tongue again, and something in the motion seemed oddly sarcastic.

"I don't like the way you look at him," it said, "and see someone else."

Kakashi set his hand against the floor, balancing. ". . . I don't do that."

The snake made a small undulating motion that almost looked like shrugging. "I only know what he tells me," it said.

"_Stop it_," Sasuke hissed, and his voice cracked on the last syllable.

Kyomamushi shifted again, sliding off of Sasuke to the floor. It then nudged his head carefully, until he was lying on the wood rather than on itself. "I'll entrust Sasuke to you for now," it told Kakashi. "Fetch the tree-girl."

It disappeared with that. The hand that Sasuke had been digging into its scales fell to the ground.

When Kakashi moved over, the teenager made an attempt to push him away, but he caught Sasuke's arm and picked him up. Sasuke stopped struggling after that, and it didn't take Kakashi long to lug him to the bedroom and lay him on top of the covers.

Kakashi checked his temperature, checked his pulse, and noticed that there was no blood on either of his hands. There weren't even any fresh cuts.

As he was filling a bowl with cold water and pulling a rag out of the kitchen drawer, he examined the area where Sasuke had been lying. There was no trace or even scent of fresh blood there, either.

Kakashi had had the dogs simply appear around him without being summoned before, too, but it was usually to ask for some kind of treat--though once he had been invited to a wedding, which he'd had to decline due to being in the middle of a mission. But that had only started happening in the last few years, and he had had a contract with the dogs for over a decade. Sasuke couldn't have had his contract for more than three years.

Every once in a while, when he really thought about it, Kakashi was amazed that all three of his students had managed to get embroiled in more trouble than should have been possible in peacetime.

"Was what he said about Naruto true?" Kakashi asked as he laid the damp cloth on Sasuke's forehead.

The teenager didn't answer. Kakashi hadn't expected him to.

——

Tsunade had taken the news relatively calmly, though it helped that Jiraiya had already returned to Lightning country and she could get a message to him faster than she could have sent someone to do additional research.

"Dammit," she muttered, tossing a dogtail that had fallen forward back over her shoulder. "All right. Write me the best description you can of these things, so I can send it to Jiraiya."

Sakura looked at Naruto. "Did they follow us into Konoha?"

When he shook his head, she looked back over and asked, "Tsunade-sensei? Can I check on Sasuke first? I'm worried about his health."

The woman raised an eyebrow. "He was acting like he was fine."

"Of course," Sakura conceded. "But he really strained his eyes when he used the mangekyou. I just want to look at him quickly--I didn't have time before, because we were trying to get back as fast as possible. And . . . I'm worried about his old wounds," she added a moment later, looking down. "I don't . . . don't think they're going to heal properly if the sutures keep getting ripped out."

Tsunade gave her a long look.

". . . Fine, go," she finally said. "Naruto can write it himself."

"I'm going with her," he said.

Tsunade started to look annoyed.

"I can write it at wherever we find him, and I'll bring it back soon as I'm done." Naruto's tone wasn't asking, or insisting, or flat--he was just stating a fact. "I'm going with her."

Sakura shifted nervously on her feet, not quite looking at him, either.

After a moment of debating with herself, Tsunade turned away. She focused her attention back on the Grassnin and waved them off. "Fine. Get it to me within an hour."

—

Sakura let out her breath once they had left the station. When Naruto glanced over, he noticed that she had intertwined her fingers and was pressing them against her stomach to hide their trembling.

He looked away again before she could catch him; and a moment later, he folded his hands behind his head.

"Geez," he muttered, loud enough for her to hear. "When I'm Hokage, I'm gonna be like the **Third**. Only way cooler."

"She's only doing her job," Sakura said quietly. "She has to think of the whole village."

"Nn," Naruto replied.

A moment later, Sakura smiled slightly and let her hands fall. "You better," she said, quietly enough that only he could hear. "We're counting on you."

Naruto nodded.

After a pause, he asked, "Do you think Kakashi-sensei will have dragged that bastard back to his apartment by now?"

"Yeah, he should have found him . . . we can check there first, anyway."

——

Sasuke had passed out some time between when Kakashi had set the cloth on his forehead and when he had rummaged through all the drawers in the bathroom, trying to find the thermometer that he was relatively certain he had.

Kakashi eventually gave up on the thermometer and brought his bottle of headache pills out of the bathroom. He was trying to decide how much he should give Sasuke, and whether they would even do any good, when Sakura and Naruto showed up.


	18. ripple 18: Sasuke redux

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.  
——————

—

"Is he okay?" was the first thing Sakura asked, as she slung her pack onto the floor and kicked off her shoes. When Kakashi replied in the negative, she didn't bother removing her shin guards and just strode into the bedroom. After that, she took over the rough care that he had been trying to provide, and Kakashi spent the next ten minutes mainly keeping out of her way.

Naruto had taken a small scroll and a bottle of ink from his shelves, and was (so Sakura briefly informed him) writing out a report on the kitsune-tsukai; but he had dragged Kakashi's table around so that he could see into the open door of the bedroom. Kakashi slouched beside the door and watched Sakura delicately study Sasuke's eyes with her chakra.

Eventually, the chakra dissipated, and Sakura let her hands fall to her lap with a tired sigh. She glanced over at him. "Kakashi-sensei . . . I . . . can I examine your eye?"

He nodded and pulled off his forehead protector, but kept that eye closed. Sakura didn't say anything about it; she just held a hand to the left side of his head, and soon Kakashi felt the odd buzz of foreign, friendly chakra invading his own system.

Sakura pulled her hand away a few minutes later, and absently rubbed her forehead with the back of her wrist.

"He has twice as many layers of chakra connecting to his eyes as you do . . . and the additional ones are . . ." she searched for an adjective, and settled on "crackling so much that they must be new. . . . And the curse seal is trying to intertwine with them. That's probably what's making him this sick."

Kakashi frowned. "Intertwine?"

Sakura made a small motion with the hand against her forehead. "The strands of the curse seal are connected to all of his chakra system--which is normal, right?" The question was rhetorical, but Kakashi nodded once anyway. "But, with this one . . . it's still connecting itself to strands that weren't there when it was placed on Sasuke."

Kakashi looked over to the bed again. In the other room, Naruto made a disgusted, angry noise.

Sakura sat down from her crouch, but a moment later shifted onto her feet again. "I don't know how to settle his chakra down. I'd say to just wait it out, but the curse seal makes that dangerous. What was in that bottle you had?"

Kakashi offered it to her and explained about headache medicine. "It's not a general kind--it was written for me by a medicnin when I first got this eye. The hospital refills the prescription when necessary."

Sakura was examining the pills inside the bottle carefully. "The medicnin who wrote the recipe. . . ?"

"She died several years ago," Kakashi said.

Sakura nodded and stood up. "Can I take this to the hospital? If I can get a list of the ingredients, that might help me figure out how to help him."

Kakashi nodded in agreement, and Sakura left. Naruto looked up when she walked into the other room.

"Don't you think we should take him to the hospital, no matter how it looks?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Remember what that snake of his said the last time something happened with his eyes? Not to put him around a lot of people. I don't know what could happen that's so disturbing, but. . . ."

"Yeah," Naruto agreed. "Then . . . I know this treatment that could help him," he said, glancing at the bedroom. "It's got . . . magnesium and feverfew, and willow bark--wait, you're supposed to add vitamin B to the feverfew. And . . . valaran root."

Sakura moved to pull on her shoes, but she looked at his face as she did. "Valerian root?"

"Yeah, that thing," Naruto said. "And yarrow and henbane."

"Henbane is poisonous . . ." she murmured. "Those others are good for headaches and fevers, but combining them . . . where did you hear about this?"

Naruto looked down at the table. ". . . it's a hangover cure I picked up while traveling."

Sakura gave him a slightly disbelieving look, but Naruto was absorbed in reading over the scroll he'd written for Tsunade. "He doesn't exactly have a hangover," she said at last.

"Yeah, but . . . I think it'd help."

Naruto obviously wasn't going to tell her where he really picked the recipe up from, so Sakura let it go. She finished pulling on her second shoe and rested her arm on her leg. "Are those all of the ingredients? And, can you tell me the measurements for them?"

Naruto started rattling the scroll, checking how fast the ink was drying. He still wasn't looking up, at either her or Kakashi leaning against the bedroom door's frame. "Give me an hour," he said. "Let me get this to Tsunade, and then I'll go find out."

Sakura pressed her lips together slightly. "Even if that works for his eyes, it's the curse seal that worries me. And I don't know how his body would react to that." She held the bottle up a little. "I think it's better to just keep him on this until he regains consciousness. He'll be able to control the seal himself, then, and he can tell me more about the mangekyou's side effects. Okay?"

"Okay," Naruto muttered, rattling the paper again.

"Sakura," Kakashi said, "after you go by the hospital, get two hours rest before you come back."

She started to frown. "Kakashi-sensei, you're the one who's had the least sleep. . . ."

"I know," he agreed. "That's why I want you to get some now, so I can leave his care over to you afterward and sleep through the afternoon. He's stable right now."

She let out a small, amused breath and nodded. "Okay. But, if he regains consciousness, will you send me a notice?"

"Yes," Kakashi said. "Where will you be? At your parents', or Lee's?"

"Lee's," Sakura replied, tucking the bottle into her pack. "Send any messages there from now on--I moved in with him when I left the hospital."

Naruto's head jerked up with that, but he quickly looked back down again. Kakashi gave her a careful look. "Sakura, do you think--?"

"I already had this fight with Lee," Sakura replied as she pulled on her pack. "Thank you for your concern, Kakashi-sensei, but this was for the best."

Kakashi didn't exactly have room to chide her, since he had moved out on his own after getting the sharingan eye and had lost track of his own mother until he'd been informed of her death on a mission. And he doubted Sakura would have listened even if he mentioned that, since the three of them seemed hell-bent on learning from their own mistakes and not those of their elders.

Plus, Sakura's parents weren't shinobi--barring another attack on the village, they were more likely to bury her.

"Okay," he said. "Come back in three hours, and I'll send a note if he wakes up before then."

Sakura rested a hand on the doorknob. "If he does, treat this like a fever--keep up the compresses, and ask how his vision is. And try to make him eat some soup. And punch him for me."

"Are those official medicnin orders?" Kakashi asked, making an effort to sound serious.

"Yes," Sakura retorted. She gave Naruto one last look, and then left.

—

Sakura returned to the apartment promptly three hours later, looking a little better for the sleep.

"Is Naruto here?" she asked with a slight frown, after kicking off her shoes. Kakashi replied that he hadn't come back after leaving to give his report to Tsunade, and asked why.

"It's nothing," she replied. Kakashi gave her a look, which she brushed off by going into the bedroom to check Sasuke's temperature.

Sakura understandably panicked a bit on finding that Sasuke had a fever of 41 degrees. She fed him two of the pills, struggled to get a full glass of milk down him while he was still unconscious (because Kakashi had told her that the pills also gave him a stomach ache if he took them without food), and put some ice in the bowl that the compresses were soaking in.

"Maybe we _should_ take him to the hospital," she murmured, disbursing her chakra and letting her hand fall away from Sasuke's eyes. "As long as he's put in a private room. . . ."

"I think the fever may be part of the sharingan's transformation," Kakashi said from his seat on the bed beside her. "When I managed to increase the visual magnitude of it--gaining the 'third comma'," he explained at her look, and tapped his forehead protector, "I was knocked out with a fever for a few days. It reached 43 degrees at the worst point."

"43--! That could have killed you!" Sakura's eyes were wide.

Kakashi nodded. "That's what they thought would happen for a while," he said with a faint smile. "But I had a good medicnin keeping track of me." He looked at Sasuke. "Even if the curse seal is aggravating him, as long as it doesn't get any higher, he should be safe staying here. I don't want to put him around other people, either, unless it's absolutely necessary."

Sakura bit her lip and turned over the cloth on Sasuke's forehead.

—

Kakashi laid out the spare futon in the shadiest part of his front room. He learned that Sasuke had woken up a little past sunset from the crash of pottery on the floor and Sakura's startled yell.

By the time Kakashi had thrown aside the covers and skidded inside the doorway, he found that Sasuke was sprawled halfway over the bed and the floor, and Sakura had managed to pin his arm and neck.

She let him go when Kakashi appeared, but Sasuke didn't move. Sakura checked his face.

"Ah," she muttered, standing up and brushing off her knees, "crap."

"What happened?" Kakashi asked as he started to heft the again unconscious Sasuke back onto the bed.

"He started to wake up right when I was changing the compress . . . I guess I startled him." She checked the side of Sasuke's face again. "That's going to bruise. . . ."

Kakashi picked up the bowl, and the two pieces that had broken off when it fell. "Ah."

"His eyes haven't changed back," Sakura said quietly.

". . . Hm," Kakashi said, keeping his voice casual. "He probably hasn't been conscious long enough to revert them back from the sharingan."

Sakura accepted his answer simply because it was the best she could hope for, until Sasuke woke up and answered everything.

—

When the hour ended and Sasuke's fever had dropped a degree, Kakashi sent Sakura home. He then summoned Pakkun and asked him to stay hidden by the window until a little while after Sasuke woke up.

It took Kakashi about three hours to write up his report of the mission, and half the night to decide what to include in it.

He had started with the easiest part, the description of the trip before they reached Kamogaya, and wrote that the team had settled together well enough to work cohesively. He chose his words carefully to lack emotional connotations when he reached Sakura's admission of knowing too much, and included Naruto's reaction. He left out the oblique references the three of them had made to their teachers shortly after.

He had gotten to Kamogaya and had just described how the bird had given away their concealment when he heard the faintest sound of cloth rustling in the other room. Kakashi continued writing, but slowed down enough that the rustle of the brush over the paper wasn't loud enough to cover noise from the other room.

After a few moments, Sasuke moved off of the bed and began walking carefully across the floor. Kakashi had moved the table back after Naruto left, so he only saw it from his peripheral vision when Sasuke paused at the doorway. There was the quiet sound of dry lips parting, but then Sasuke changed his mind and stumbled towards the bathroom.

_He's walking too heavily_, Kakashi noted. _His sight must still be blurred_.

Kakashi remained at the table up to the point he heard the mirror shatter.

When he stepped into view of the bathroom, he found Sasuke trying to grind the shards with his bare heel.

"Please don't break my house, Sasuke," he said, leaning against the doorframe.

Sasuke glared at him, fists clenched. Kakashi took the one second risk and looked him in the eyes, and found that they were still in the sharingan, but not the mangekyou.

"_You_," Sasuke snarled. "You . . . **fuck** you! I--it's just a mirror!"

Kakashi wondered what he had been about to say. "Sasuke--"

"Shut up! Just because you _stole_ an eye doesn't give you the right to lecture me on my clan!"

Kakashi narrowed his gaze slightly, but kept his casual pose. "Sasuke."

Sasuke took a step back, fists still clenched, shaking slightly. "Everything, it's either meaningless or a disappointment to you! If--what was the _point!_" he demanded, staring at him. "Everything that--what the hell was the **point**? I would have killed h--and I left them with those bastards to be--"

Sasuke choked that sentence down before he could say too much, and regained some control over himself. He glared at everything in the small bathroom but Kakashi and the broken mirror.

Kakashi waited a few moments for Sasuke to loosen his fists, but when he decided that that wasn't going to happen, he let his head tilt slightly to the side.

"You have other people to get stronger for, you know," he said calmly.

Sasuke was quiet for a little bit, but then he shook his head slightly. "It's not that ea. . ." he muttered tiredly, taking another step back. "I already _told_ her. . . ."

Sasuke finally seemed to notice he was walking on broken glass. He maneuvered away from it and sat down on the edge of the tub.

Kakashi pushed away from the doorframe with his shoulder and got a rag from the replaced bowl. He cupped a palm under it as he brought it back, to keep the excess water from dripping on his floorboards.

When he walked back into the bathroom, Sasuke was staring at the opposite wall. He had pulled up the foot that had been cut on the glass, and was resting it on his opposite leg. The motion had rucked up his pants leg, and Kakashi noticed what he hadn't seen when he'd tugged off Sasuke's boots--a faded-looking tattoo a few centimeters above his right ankle.

He held out the cloth, and Sasuke took it without looking at him.

". . . I'm sorry," the teenager said, as he pressed the cloth to his bleeding knuckles. "I didn't have the right to say that."

Sasuke didn't specify which of the several things he had said that he was sorry for, but Kakashi could guess.

He should have removed that photo when Sasuke first came to stay with him months ago. While Obito hadn't been wearing any visible mark of his clan in it, and the Uchiha hadn't had a monopoly on dark hair and eyes, there was also a very limited amount of people that Kakashi could have received the sharingan from without being legally charged by the clan. And since it obviously hadn't been his teacher, that left one of his teammates.

He should have . . . but, hindsight.

Kakashi leaned against the sink. "You don't remind me of him," he said.

Sasuke's fingers tensed slightly against the cloth, and he moved to press it to his heel. He had to shift his foot forward to do so, to keep the cloth from dampening his pants, and the motion revealed more of the faded tattoo.

Sasuke didn't say anything for a moment, but he glanced over at Kakashi long enough to determine that the man had noticed the marks.

". . . It's the first place I got bit," he said, shifting his face away so that Kakashi couldn't see it directly in the shards. "It shows up when ever I summon them too often. I don't have to use it, because I don't summon the big ones."

If Sasuke was apologizing _and_ offering information on himself, then he genuinely regretted what he said.

Kakashi held out hope that in a few more years, Sasuke would learn enough self-control to not say things he wanted to apologize for in the first place. But for now, this would do. He nodded, and Sasuke turned the rag over and pressed it back against the cut.

They were both quiet after that. When a couple minutes had passed, Kakashi pushed away from the door again and returned to the table. He heard Sasuke rummage through the cabinet and tape down a bandage before throwing the glass in the small trash can.

When the blanket was no longer rustling and Sasuke's breathing had gone back to sleeping mode, Pakkun stretched and scratched behind his ear.

"So, I don't need to warn anyone?" he asked.

Kakashi shook his head. "No, things are okay," he said, absently using one of Sakura's words. "Thanks."

Pakkun shook himself once, and then disappeared.

—

By the time Kakashi had completed his report, he had included how Sasuke had chased off the raven, Sasuke's conversation with the Soundnins which had revealed the Hidden Grass's involvement in their presence, Sakura and Naruto's suspicions about Akatsuki and how they had come by them, that he had let slip enough information about the bijuu for Naruto to guess what it referred to, Sakura and Sasuke's fight, and Sakura warning Naruto that people were beginning to be suspicious of the team's closeness. He left out the last words Sakura had said regarding Tsunade in the fight, and her accidental implication that she felt obligated to Tsunade because of what the woman had done for Lee, and the viper's unanswered question about killing the Soundnin.

He included the fact that Sasuke could mimic Orochimaru's voice, because the Sandnins had heard it as well, and what Sasuke had said about Naruto having the right to record the mangekyou's secrets when he became Hokage. Kakashi knew that that would irritate Tsunade, but he hoped in the long run it would be better than if it looked like Sasuke was keeping it a secret from everyone.

He also included the fact that Sasuke had disclosed some of the specific information within his hearing, but that he had not added it to his report in order to maintain a trusted position with the teenager. At a later time, he would likely turn it over. Kakashi spent a half an hour finding the right wording for that particular paragraph.

He also left out the most disturbing detail he had noted in Sasuke's fighting style. That decision took longer than any of the ones regarding the Soundnins.

What Sasuke had done to the Grassnin he captured had been malicious, deliberately so, and his reasoning behind it could be anywhere from questionable to dangerous--especially since his words to Sakura and later Kakashi had indicated he was angry about what had happened to the Soundnins and had coldly used that anger to increase the mangekyou's power. But that wasn't what troubled Kakashi the most.

What troubled Kakashi the most was that when Sasuke had yanked his katana from one of the ninjas he had killed, he had wrenched it to the side instead of pulling it straight out.

That action had been unnecessary, and all it had served to do was leave the ninja in more pain before he died. But there had been nothing cruel in Sasuke's motions. The whole move, from the thrust to the kick, had been executed with the smooth ease of practice.

It reminded Kakashi that someone other than him had taught Sasuke how to kill.

It was not, in comparison, the most damning thing against Sasuke. In fact, it probably would have been met with simple expectation and then passed over--in peace time, the Leaf didn't teach its genin to kill, so of course Sasuke had to have learned at the Sound.

But Kakashi left it out anyway.

—

He dropped the scroll off at the tower early in the morning, and came back to the apartment to find Sakura sitting on his front step.

"I _asked_ you to contact me when he woke up for good," she mentioned. When Kakashi raised an eyebrow at her, she added, "You wouldn't have left him alone if he were still unconscious, and Tsunade-sensei is keeping Naruto with her until she hears back from Jiraiya."

"Ah, well," Kakashi said, scratching the back of his head while unlocking the door. "I was busy trying to get that report written and turned in. . . ."

"Hmph," she replied, looking down at the sack of food she was carrying.

When they got inside, the shower was running. Sakura banged on the door and yelled for Sasuke to hurry, because she had other things to do. He didn't bother to answer.

"Oh," she added, turning back to the door, "I'm sorry about your face."

Sasuke cut the water off long enough to reply, "That was you?"

"You don't remember?"

". . . Just that someone was attacking me."

Sakura pursed her lips slightly. "I was changing the cloth on your forehead, Sasuke."

There was a pause, and then he turned the water back on. She rolled her eyes and left the bedroom.

When she was near Kakashi again, Sakura indicated the sack and asked, "Can I keep this in your fridge? Just for a little while."

He nodded. "That's a lot of food."

"Lee's birthday was two days ago," she explained as she started putting things away. "He's supposed to be back from his mission today, so I wanted to cook something he liked."

——

It took Sasuke less than ten minutes to be dressed and out of the bathroom, but his hair was still wet. Sakura took his temperature first of all, and was glad to see it was down to a bearable 37 degrees.

"Dry your hair," she commented as she put the thermostat away. "It'll make things worse."

"I'm not going to catch a cold," Sasuke said with mild annoyance.

She ignored him. "Kakashi-sensei? Can I borrow your mirror?" she called to the front room.

"Probably not," he replied.

Sakura gave him an odd look through the doorway as she walked to the bathroom.

When she came out a minute later with a large shard of the mirror that she had fished from the trash and washed off, Sasuke had shifted so that he was sitting with his bandaged heel tucked beneath his other leg. His hands were resting palms up on his lap.

Sakura sat on the bed beside him. "Did you know your eyes look like this?" she asked, and held the shard up half a meter from his face.

Sasuke gave her a flat look. Sakura countered with an impassive one.

Finally he took the mirror from her and held it a hand's span from his face. Sakura folded her hands in her lap, and didn't comment on his knuckles.

Sasuke studied his reflection. "They look like the normal sharingan."

"I know," she said. "How long has your sight been that bad?"

"It started almost immediately," he replied. "But I can still see chakra clearly. I made it back following Naruto and Kakashi-sensei."

"And it's not permanent?"

Sasuke let the hand holding the shard drop and gave her a cold look.

"You're stupid when it comes to him," Sakura said flatly.

"It's not permanent," Sasuke replied, holding the mirror out to her with a sharp movement. "It happened when I first gained the mangekyou, too. It's just taking longer to go back to normal this time."

"Is that a part of the increase in the illusion, or does it feel like the curse seal is tampering with it?" she asked.

Sasuke shrugged a shoulder, and Sakura's eyes narrowed.

"You knew other stuff about this jutsu," she said, folding her arms. "Don't try to tell me you don't know whether this is normal or not."

"The descriptions of the effects are too sparse," he told her. "I don't know whether the curse seal is amplifying them or not."

"There's _descriptions_" Sakura said disbelievingly. "Why didn't you **tell** me that? That would have helped me a lot more than just making guesses on what would work!"

"No," Sasuke said.

Sakura was silent for a long time.

Finally, she pushed herself off of the bed, and folded her arms again before turning to glare at him.

"Fine," she said. "Then tell me the name of the medicnin you trust more than me. I'll go get them, and _they_ can treat you."

Sasuke watched her impassively.

Sakura snarled under her breath and stormed out of the room. Kakashi looked up from where he was gluing the bowl back together.

"If he starts dying again, take him to the hospital," she told the man as she wrenched on her shoes. "But I doubt **they'll** be able to do anything either."

She slammed the door so hard behind her that Kakashi winced for the frame. When he glanced into the bedroom, Sasuke had laid out on the bed, facing the wall, with his head pillowed on one arm.

Sakura's dramatic exit was lessened somewhat by the fact that she had to return two minutes later to get the food she had left in Kakashi's fridge. Sasuke was still glaring at the wall, and didn't acknowledge her entrance and second exit. She didn't slam the door this time, for which Kakashi was mildly grateful.

Occasionally, he forgot that Sakura _was_ just fifteen, the same as Sasuke and Naruto. He made a note of this event to remind him of it when she started acting too old for her years again.

He checked the bedroom after setting the bowl to dry, and found that Sasuke had fallen into another light doze.

The teenager woke up in the early afternoon. He said that his eyesight was almost back to normal, before apologizing for imposing on the man's hospitality. Kakashi passed over Sasuke's retreat to the cover of formal language, and made him eat a light lunch and take one last pill before letting him go.


	19. ripple 19: Itachi

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

This chapter near to killed me. Everybody's pouring their hearts out everywhere, you'd think they'd been slipped Veritaserum.  
——————

—

_Snakes were not always thought of as symbols of evil, but also of love with no bounds._

_"Long ago in Keicho era, there lived a beautiful girl in Senju in the province of Musashi. A bachelor called Yaichiro fell in love with her and sent her many missives of love to her; but she did not respond. Yaichiro died of sorrow, and the girl married someone else. On the morning after the wedding, the couple didn't emerge from their room. When the bride's mother entered, she found the bridegroom dead, and a snake crawling out of one of the bride's eyes. The villagers believed that the snake was none other than the heartbroken Yaichiro."_

—

Sasuke had been using the sharingan often after he gained the mangekyou, but now that he had reached the level of Tsukiyomi, he quit and focused on taijutsu again for the next few days. Tsunade had finally released Naruto back into the village, after getting a letter from Jiraiya that the information matched what he'd been investigating on the Cloudnin who'd defected to Akatsuki. Sakura knew that that the two of them had been sparring, but she didn't know that Sasuke had convinced Lee to help him polish his taijutsu until Lee limped into the apartment three days later, supporting Sasuke, who had two broken ribs.

"Oh, for. . . ." Sakura moved the pots off of the burners, glad that she hadn't been back long enough to really start dinner, and went to check Lee first.

"You couldn't have just kept sparring with Naruto?" she asked as she finished taping up Sasuke's chest. "I don't need people talking about how my husband and my teammate are beating each other up."

"With his clones, I have to resort to ninjutsu," Sasuke replied with a faint wince. "And it's taijutsu I've been neglecting."

Lee, who'd gone to the kitchen to take over making dinner after Sakura took care of the large bruise on his leg, started humming cheerfully when she called him that. Sasuke paused and then frowned.

"I thought your birthday was in the spring," he said.

"It is," Sakura replied, putting the tape away. "But all that's left is the paperwork and the formal ceremony, so does it matter?"

Sasuke shook his head. He stood up and stretched carefully, testing his ribs. "Do you have half an hour?"

Sakura gave him a curious look, but agreed.

While Sasuke was pulling on his shirt, she went into the kitchen and kissed Lee on the cheek. "I'll be back soon, okay?"

"Sure," he said, giving her a quick hug.

—

When she asked where they were going, Sasuke didn't answer. Sakura sighed in dramatic annoyance, pulled up the collar of her coat, and strode alongside him.

When they turned off of one particular street and Sakura realized they were walking towards the Uchiha compound, she slid her hands into her pockets. She slowed her pace a little, but when Sasuke didn't change his, she moved to catch up.

Sasuke led her to the Takano shrine without looking around. By the time they reached it, Sakura had moved her hands out of her pockets and was clasping her elbows, not comfortable with walking so directly through the area. She hadn't picked up any of Tsunade's superstitious traits over the years, but the Uchiha compound was closer to being treated as haunted than any of the other still-emptied houses in the village, if only because all of its occupants had died during peacetime.

When they were inside the shrine, out of the wind, Sasuke took a small flashlight out of his side pack and held it out. "Here."

She took it and watched as he started walking toward one of the tatami mats. "Sasuke. . . ."

He pried the mat away and slid it to the side, revealing a basement area that a shrine shouldn't have had. He stayed in the crouch as he looked at her.

"Even if I use the sharingan as sparingly as possible, I'm going to start going blind within a decade," Sasuke replied. "There is no medicnin I trust more than you." He jumped over the edge, landing on the stairs, and began walking down.

Sakura stayed where she was for a moment, watching his hair blend in and disappear. Then she let out a breath and turned the flashlight on.

—

The stairs were stone and slightly mildewed. Sasuke was waiting at the bottom as she walked gingerly down them. He led her to an alcove at the end of the room, and pointed out a large stone that looked a little like a monument.

"That's the basic description of the mangekyou and its levels," Sasuke said, as he walked around to the back. "These are all the medical descriptions that I know of." There was a scraping of stone, and then of metal, as he spoke; but by then Sakura was already caught up in reading. Sasuke set the small steel box beside her and moved to lean against the wall.

Sakura let out a small, sharp exhalation before she could stop herself when she read how the mangekyou had to be initially attained.

"He already knows," Sasuke replied, still leaning against the wall.

She started to turn towards him, and then thought better of it and pointed the flashlight at the ground first. "That . . . is that why you tried to kill him that time?"

"Three times," Sasuke corrected. "I hit him twice with the chidori, and the other time I drove a hand through his lung."

When she didn't reply, he paused, and flexed his fingers slightly. "I was aiming for his heart," he explained a little more quietly. "He shoved my hand aside at the last second."

Sakura had to swallow a few times before she could make herself speak again.

"Was it really that important?"

"N--yes." Sasuke started to frown. ". . . no."

Sakura waited for a little while, but he didn't explain. At last she decided to kneel down in front of the stone, and shine the flashlight on it, as though she were reading again.

Sasuke didn't let her use the body language, though, and sat down himself to keep them at the same general height.

"If I had . . ." he started out, and then stopped. Then he folded his arms over his chest and made himself start again. "If I had let him keep talking, he could have talked me into coming back. That was . . . mostly why."

Sasuke glared at the ground. "To be dragged back here and have everyone know it was because of _him_, to have to face Kakashi and you again. . . . That would have been the worst."

Sakura restrained herself from turning toward him again. "So it was better to kill him?"

"Yes."

She supposed it had been hard for Sasuke to realize he had faith in someone again, but that was still excessive.

Since Sakura wasn't sure how to reply to such a blunt statement, she eventually gave up and asked instead, "Was it easier after time passed?"

Sasuke shifted out of his cross-legged position so that his legs were bent in front of him. "No."

Sakura lifted her eyebrows briefly in an unsurprised expression, and turned her attention back to the stone. She read the description of how often the sharingan had to be used and how extensively the mangekyou's illusion had to be applied in order to reach the Tsukiyomi with a similar lack of surprise; Sasuke had already referred to that information.

Sasuke knew when she reached the description of how one had to kill a blood relation in order to attain the Amaterasu. Her hand started shaking.

He looked at the ground in front of him. "I assume it means a blood relation of equal strength," he said. "Shisui was a first cousin, so he should have counted otherwise."

The flashlight made a sharp 'tak' noise when it hit the floor, and Sakura slid around to glare angrily at him, hands clenching into fists on the stones.

"**Why**!" she demanded, half-choking on the word. "If you knew that this, this was the real--_why!_ **Sasuke**!"

Sasuke was glad she had dropped the flashlight, because his next words were the reason he had brought it in the first place and had refused to light the torches.

"Because I loved him."

Sakura made a confused, stifled noise and stared at him. Sasuke still couldn't make himself look up from the ground.

"He was . . . cool," he added quietly, folded his arms on his knees and leaning toward them. "He was everything I was trying to be. That's why . . . more than. . . ."

Sasuke trailed off, and then clenched a hand into a fist and made himself keep talking. If he couldn't meet her eyes even in the dark, then he could at least answer the damn question.

"More than never getting my father's approval," he said, hating the words even as he spoke them, "more than earning my survival, more than . . . more than any of that. I can't--" Sasuke cut himself off.

He paused for a moment, and then said: "I won't forgive him for not being who I thought he was."

Sakura sat back on her heels. She made a noise like she had tried to speak while still biting her lip, paused, and then whispered, "But . . . why . . . why can't you just . . . I _know_ I don't understand, I know I have a family, but why can't you just look _away_ from it?" Her knuckles scrapped on the stones slightly as she clenched her fists tighter. "Why can't you just . . . just look to _us_? We're here, **now**."

"Because I don't care for you three as much as I did him," Sasuke said, still staring at the ground.

Sakura slumped slightly, and let out a ragged breath.

Several long moments later, she shifted and pulled her legs up to her chest.

". . . I wish you'd said it was because you were an avenger," she murmured, pushing her bangs away from her face. "I could have hit you then."

Sasuke didn't try to smile at the comment, but a moment later he did let his fist unclench. He looked up to the wall across from him.

It wasn't easy to tell how much time passed like that, but when Sakura shifted to wrap her arms around her legs, the sound of the cloth rustling was startling.

"You know . . ." she said quietly, and clasped her elbows. "You know what I'm most afraid of?"

Sasuke didn't reply, but it wasn't necessary for him to. "That when I die, somehow it's going to look like Lee's fault," Sakura told him. "Like if he had been just a little faster, or if he had been in the right place, or whatever there is. . . . I'm afraid that Naruto's going to think he should have prevented it. And if he did think . . . what he might do. . . ."

Her grip tightened slightly. Sasuke finally looked over, but she was staring down at the flashlight.

"It's scary, you know?" she asked quietly. "I don't want to . . . _belong_ to someone like that, when it . . . and with you. . . ." She looked up at him. "That was the other reason I wanted you to tell me so I could drug him, if you were going to leave us. So that he . . . I think he'd rather see you dead than walk away again, he'd think it was more logical, since it's not like . . . he's not. . . ."

She realized that her words were stumbling and stopped talking then, but Sasuke could finish the sentence himself.

Naruto wasn't completely human anymore. Not after spending so long being that intertwined with the fox demon.

That was the second aftereffect, and the one that Sakura and Sasuke were doing their best to keep to themselves.

"I know," he replied. Sakura nodded her head once, and bit her lip again briefly and looked back at the flashlight. Neither of them spoke further.

Finally, after a few minutes had passed and the silence was beginning to unnerve her, Sakura picked up the flashlight and turned her attention to the metal box. She began reading through the first of the several small scrolls inside.

She had just opened the second one and had started reading it when she reached a description of the treatment prescribed for anyone who had used the mangekyou too much at once and was consequently exhausted or suffering from a migraine. The list of ingredients was nearly the same as the one that she'd received when she'd taken Kakashi's pills to the hospital, down to the feverfew and yarrow and trace amount of henbane.

Sakura gave the list a tired look, and then glanced over at Sasuke from the corner of her eye. He was leaning against the wall now, gazing up at the ceiling; but she could just barely see that he was running his thumb over the nail of his middle finger, and that small movement was enough to show he was still agitated.

She glanced back down at the scroll and debated. Soon, though, she decided that revealing it down here might go better than anywhere else.

"Huh," Sakura murmured, half to herself.

Sasuke glanced over; but when she said nothing else and unrolled the scroll a little further, he stopped his hand and said "What?"

"This list," she replied, lifting the scroll slightly. "This part's a description of a treatment for your headaches--it matches most of what's in those pills Kakashi-sensei has." She unrolled the scroll another few lines further, keeping the flashlight and her gaze trained on it. "It's just weird . . . while you were unconscious, Naruto told me about this hangover cure he picked up that he wanted me to use on you. It had all this stuff, too."

There was about another minute of silence.

Sakura assumed that Sasuke had worked it out when he snarled under his breath: "Fucking _fox_."

But Sasuke's voice didn't sound like he was going to go out and put a fist through Naruto's stomach, so she didn't say anything when he went on.

"I'm not surprised," Sasuke sneered viciously, "they don't have any sense of fucking decency anyway." He shoved himself onto his feet and started pacing.

"Theft," Sasuke added, after he'd reached the opposite wall and turned around again, "that's what they're best known for."

Sakura rattled the scroll faintly, showing that they were still there. Sasuke ignored her.

"Theft, and destroying things, and . . . seducing humans, and pulling those _fucking_ pranks--no wonder everyone hated him for those, always reminding them of what he was, an--"

Sasuke froze mid-step and mid-sentence.

Sakura frowned at the sudden silence, and looked over at him. "What is it?"

Sasuke was still for a few more seconds. And then he turned and ran up the stairs.

Sakura stood, the first scroll falling out of her lap. "Wha--Sasuke!"

He didn't answer and was already out of sight. Sakura grabbed the scroll on the ground and the metal box, and ran for the stairs as well. She shoved the two scrolls into the container and latched it as she ran out of the shrine, trying to catch up.

The other teenager still didn't answer when she called out to him, and once they were past the gate of the Uchiha compound, Sasuke jumped onto a nearby roof and began moving along those. Sakura stopped wasting her breath and just kept pace.

When they reached Naruto's apartment building, Sasuke skidded down the roof to the walkway in front of his door, not even bothering to land gracefully. He was banging on the door by the time Sakura jumped down beside him.

"What the _hell_? Sasuke!"

"Where **is** he?" Sasuke muttered, mostly to himself.

Sakura shifted the container under her arm and grabbed his wrist. "What is **wrong**?" she demanded, keeping her voice even to hide the fact that Sasuke's actions were beginning to scare her.

"I need to know what kind of foxes were following us," Sasuke hissed. "If they were. . . ." He didn't finish, and kicked the door.

Sakura let him pull his wrist out of her grip to do so, and tightened the fingers that were holding the box. Sasuke paced across the short space of the walkway once, paused in front of the door, and then kicked it again.

If he'd been kicking near the handle, the lock would have broken. As he was kicking near the center, the wood just cracked.

"_Sasuke_," Sakura said calmly and emphatically. "Calm down. Why is--"

"He'll notice faster if I'm angry," Sasuke snapped.

"Okay," she said. "Fine. Why does it matter what kind of foxes were--"

She didn't get to finish that question, either, because by that time they could both sense Naruto's chakra nearby.

"Finally," Sasuke muttered under his breath, and a few moments later Naruto and Iruka landed on the roof.

"**Damn**, Sasuke!" Naruto said, crouched and staring over the edge of the roof at them. "What the hell is it! With you like that, and Sakura getting . . . geez, I thought they'd come to arrest you."

He said that with a half-laugh and a grin, but it didn't reach his eyes. Iruka, kneeling beside him and rubbing the ache of a sudden force of chakra out of his leg, couldn't see it. Sasuke and Sakura pretended not to.

"Were the foxes following us back hito-kitsune?" Sasuke demanded.

"What?" Naruto replied.

"Were they hito-kitsune?"

"How would I--"

"**Ask**," Sasuke snapped. "**Now**."

Naruto's eyes narrowed. "What the fuck is so--"

Sasuke caught the edge of the roof and swung himself up, landing in a crouch next to Naruto. "The hito-kitsune can possess people," he hissed.

It was quiet for a few moments.

Then Sakura's grip on the container shifted, until she was clutching it and pressing it against her stomach. "Oh, _fuck_," she whispered.

Naruto glanced down at her, then started and looked back to Sasuke. "Wait, you don't mean--" He shook his head, but leaned forward. "But there was only seven or something following us. That's not so--"

"No one sends all their forces on a scouting mission," Sasuke said flatly. "And even seven anbu from this village is enough."

Naruto sat back and ran his hands roughly through his hair, staring down. A moment later, Sakura shifted her grip on the metal box enough to jump onto the roof beside Iruka, and the man began discreetly questioning her.

A few moments after that, Naruto tensed and then tilted his head back up to look at Sasuke's eyes.

"Shit," Sasuke said quietly.

Iruka set a hand on Naruto's shoulder. "Are these the foxes that you guys thought were from Akatsuki?" he asked, looking at Sasuke.

"Yeah," Naruto said roughly.

"Then we have to inform the Hokage," Iruka said, standing. "Come on."

They took off again over the roofs toward the tower. Sakura fell behind just long enough to henge the metal container into a grocery bag.

—

When they reached the end of the explanation, Tsunade looked tired.

"You're certain about this?" she asked, leaning against the front of her desk.

Sasuke nodded. She looked over at Naruto, who was sitting on the arm of the couch, and he said, "Yeah. H--it confirmed that's what they were."

Tsunade gave him a sharp glance at the slip, but didn't say anything. "So we're at risk of seven people being possessed?"

Naruto shook his head and started tapping his ankle against the side of the sofa. "It would be more; those were just scouts."

"How many more?" she asked, and both Naruto and Sakura looked to Sasuke. He folded his arms, frowning out her windows.

"Well?" Tsunade said more sharply after several seconds.

"I can't remember if it's twenty-five, ninety-nine, or one hundred," Sasuke replied. "Two of the stories might be false, or they might all be correct based on different families."

Tsunade let out a breath.

"And how do we prevent it from happening?"

Sasuke paused again. "There might be a way to ward people so that they can't be possessed." When Tsunade raised an eyebrow at him, he shifted his footing in a small, frustrated motion; but his voice continued to be the flatly even tone that he always used when speaking to her. "My training in this area is extremely superficial. You need to get the advice of a real onmyouji."

"Haa," Tsunade said quietly, and began tapping her fingers against her arm. She looked over at Iruka. "Go tell them to get a hawk ready to fly to Lightning country. And then go to Shizune's apartment and tell her I want to see her here as soon as possible."

Iruka nodded. "Yes, Hokage-sama."

Tsunade watched him leave and continued to stare at the door after it was closed. She was still tapping her fingers against her arm.

"I want the three of you to spend the night at Naruto's," she said. "Set up traps once you get inside, and don't leave until you're contacted. I'll have several anbu stationed around the area."

Naruto let out an annoyed breath, but had the sense not to argue. Sakura nodded. "Yes, Tsunade-sensei."

Tsunade glanced back over at Sasuke. "Why didn't you mention this sooner?"

"I didn't recall it until now," he answered.

She raised an eyebrow. "And why was it just now that you happened to recall it?"

Sakura fidgeted. Sasuke was silent for a second, and then said, "I was insulting fox spirits. I remembered this ability while I was trying to think of their other bad traits."

Naruto paused his ankle long enough to glare at him. "What? Bastard!"

Tsunade refused to smile. "And _why_ were you doing that?"

Sasuke was silent for much longer than a second.

"We were talking," Sakura finally said. She shifted the grocery sack to her other hip, and quietly added, "We were discussing a hangover cure."

Naruto froze and then tensed up. He looked in the other direction.

Sasuke was still glaring out the windows, and Sakura was wearing that innocent but blank expression that Tsunade could recognize but never fully interpret. The older woman assumed that they were speaking in code or at least in shared memories, made a note of it, and said, "I see."

She stopped tapping her fingers, but continued to rest her hand on her arm. "Very well. You can go."

Sasuke strode out first, and Tsunade noticed that Naruto waited until Sakura was between them to slide off the couch arm and follow.

—

"Does she really think this is a good idea?" Sasuke said as they made their way to the apartment, quietly and rapidly, before the anbu could be informed and get close enough to overhear. "They can possess us as easily."

"It makes sense," Sakura replied, just as quiet. ". . . If worse comes to worse, we know each others' weaknesses and fighting habits better than anyone else."

She jumped from the street to a roof, and began moving along that. When Sasuke and Naruto followed, she added, "And we'll be less likely to use killing attacks in that kind of situation, than some of the anbu."

"How considerate for her favorite," Sasuke replied.

Naruto growled faintly. Sakura jumped to a balcony a level above them.

"Don't, Sasuke," she said. "Just--don't."

He snorted, but said nothing else.

—

After that, Naruto and Sasuke hadn't spoken toward each other, but for a while after they got to the apartment they could pretend that it was because the three of them were busy setting up traps along the door and windows.

Sakura left it alone. When they were done, she washed a pot and threw some rice into it, and picked a fight with Naruto over the expired milk in the small fridge so that he would have an excuse to remain in the kitchen while Sasuke stayed in the other room and checked the traps for the eighth time.

Dinner was slightly more awkward. Sakura leaned against the counter to eat, Naruto sat on the table rather than the chair, and Sasuke took the floor with a wince. After she finished, Sakura healed his ribs further, so that the bruises were just an ugly sunken yellow.

"Every time I plan to leave you to heal on your own because you annoyed me, something comes up and I have to fix it anyway," she muttered when she was done, as Naruto rinsed the bowls in the sink.

"Am I supposed to say 'lucky me'?" Sasuke replied, pulling his shirt on gingerly. Sakura rolled her eyes.

They checked the traps again, individually noted the placement of anbu around the apartment for different reasons, and then Sakura pulled the shutters closed and finally unhenged the grocery bag.

"When was the last time you washed your sheets?" she asked Naruto, standing next to the bedroom door, metal box in hand.

He blinked. "Uh. . . ."

"I'll sleep on the blanket," Sakura decided, and then said "Good night" and shut the door.

Sasuke gave it an irritated look before turning around. "I call the couch."

"Hey, it's my house," Naruto retorted.

"So be hospitable to your guests."

"You're not a guest, bastard, you're a teammate," he muttered, but as he spoke he was moving to the bedroom to bang on the door and demand that Sakura at least let him have the bottom quilt. She acquiesced, but refused to give up the pillow.

—

The couch was a lot nicer than most of the other stuff in Naruto's apartment, since Iruka had given it to the teenager when he'd replaced his old one. Naruto had refused at first--covering pride by saying the thing was too much of a hassle to try and fit through the door--but Iruka had told him that it was good to keep a spare surface for times when he came back from missions and lacked the energy to wash off before sleeping. He'd informed Naruto that it was easier to clean blood and dirt out of sofa cushions than a futon.

About an hour later, Naruto had wrenched a cushion out from under Sasuke's feet, and was using it for a pillow as he lay on the quilt and Sasuke lay on the couch and they listened to Sakura pacing in the other room.

After she'd punched a wall and taken a break for a shower, Naruto snickered half-heartedly.

"I'm surprised she's not in here swearing at you, with some of the crap written on those things," he muttered, cracking the silence.

"Don't insult my clan's secrets, asshole," Sasuke replied in a flat voice.

He was quiet for several seconds, and then added, "She's probably worried that the anbu would overhear."

Naruto made a noise in the back of his throat that was either an agreement or another insult. Sasuke didn't try to figure it out. "I'm sure they're already wondering why she's beating up your walls."

"When we went to get the furniture and stuff for you, that was the only place on the compound you'd visited," Naruto said abruptly. "Besides the graveyard. I didn't go looking for it, I was just--I dunno, I thought you must've also had some stuff stored there. Other weapons you didn't want Kakashi-sensei to know about. When I found the basement area, I waited and came back after the sur . . . after. So none of the anbu saw it."

Sasuke didn't reply immediately, to see if Naruto was finished. When the other teenager didn't say any more, just waited for his reaction, Sasuke replied, "I didn't assume that you would have let them," without moving.

Naruto fidgeted a little, and finally rolled onto his back. He draped the jacket he was using as a blanket back over his chest before folding his arms above his head. Sasuke shifted onto his side, facing the back of the couch.

"You're a fucking idiot," Naruto finally said.

"I made this choice before I ever met you," Sasuke replied. "So shut up."

Naruto clenched his hands into fists, and pulled one of his legs up. He began agitatedly working his toes into the quilt.

"Yeah," he muttered. "Yeah. I get it, bastard. Everything I've done for half my life has been to become Hokage. If _that's_ how bad you want to kill Itachi, then . . . fine. **Fine**!" he snapped, glaring over at Sasuke's back. "But don't think you're gonna run off and try and get yourself dead and blind alone! Got it!"

Sasuke had to swallow before speaking, and he hoped it hadn't been as loud as it had seemed. "Whatever."

The quilt rustled as Naruto shoved himself onto his side. "I mean it, asshole! I won't let--"

"_Fine_," Sasuke snapped, back still to him. "Next time, actually take out the shark bastard instead of standing around and making the pervert sannin do all the work."

Naruto was quiet for a moment. Then he flopped over onto the quilt again.

"Shut up," he retorted, folding his arms under his head again. "That was the first time I'd seen those Akatsuki guys. I'll beat them next time!"

"Beat _him_," Sasuke corrected, keeping emotion out of his voice.

Naruto made a half-growling noise that Sasuke took as an agreement.

Half an hour later, after they'd heard Sakura get out of the bathroom and go to sleep, Naruto said quietly: "You're still an idiot."

Sasuke didn't contradict him.

—

The anbu guard had changed sometime last night, Naruto noticed as he checked the traps at the window the next morning. They were in the same places, but the masks were different.

Sakura had still been in the bedroom when Sasuke woke up, so he had washed his face at the kitchen sink. He was back in the main room, drying it with the sleeve of his shirt, when Sakura entered and said: "I want you to use the mangekyou on me."

Naruto pulled the shutters closed again and looked behind him. Sakura was tying on her forehead protector, and Sasuke was still drying his face.

He finished a moment later, and let his arm drop, giving Sakura a look that Naruto couldn't see since Sasuke's back was to him but that he could guess.

Sakura finished tying the knot and let her arms drop as well, settling on her hips. "This is only chance we may have to find out how badly it backlashes on you, and why. You're strong--according to those scrolls, you shouldn't have been affected as badly last time as you were."

Sasuke had folded his arms. "That was different--I told you, that was because I increased the level of it."

"I read the black scroll, too," Sakura replied, giving him a look. "It was still too drastic--your fever shouldn't have gotten that high. I need to see if it's the curse seal." She paused, and then added with a raised eyebrow: "Or you_ could_ just tell me whatever it is you're hiding."

Sasuke didn't move abruptly at that statement, and he didn't freeze up, but it was hard to miss the sudden tension in his body that came from not doing either of those things. Naruto frowned and turned fully around.

It was even harder to miss if you could see his expression, Naruto supposed, because Sakura barely took a breath before dropping her arms from her hips and pushing her bangs away from her face.

"Either way," she went on, and the tension in Sasuke's shoulders didn't dissipate, "I want to check it now before the Akatsuki come crashing down on us. And you need to know your limits, since this--" she waved a hand back towards the bedroom, indicating the box "--isn't helping."

"It'll affect you," Sasuke warned, fingers tense where his arms were still folded.

"Are you going to attack me?" she asked.

"No," he replied.

"Then the affects should be negligible," Sakura said, and sat down on the floor.

Sasuke didn't move. "We should at least eat first."

"I don't want to risk throwing up," Sakura replied. She looked up at him. "Come on--the sooner you use it, the sooner you'll recover later."

Naruto took a step closer. "Hey, hey, Sakura-chan, this is a bad idea. If it affects you, you're not going to be able to study him better afterward, right?"

"Yeah," she agreed, still looking Sasuke straight in the eyes. "But he has to use it on someone for me to be able to judge the backlash, and there's no one else but you."

Sasuke let his breath out in a hiss. And then he unfolded his arms and sat down on the floor across from her.

Naruto strode over, but by the time he reached their sides, Sakura's gaze was already unfocused.

—

They were standing in a large field--grassland, but it ended in a cliff in the distance and she could see the ocean, heavy and gray, just past it. Sakura watched with an impressed interest as a wind blew and the grass bent beneath it in waves.

"Where is this?" she asked, still staring out at the ocean in fascination.

"An area in Sound," Sasuke replied. "Waterfall village allied itself with the Leaf early, so we had to travel by boat to reach Earth country. You should see the port to the left."

Sakura shielded her eyes with a hand and squinted in the direction he was pointing. ". . . It's blurry."

Sasuke frowned at the area, focusing, and a moment later he asked, "Better?"

"Yeah," she said, letting her hand drop. "I can see the mast of a ship." She caught a handful of the tall grass and tugged, noticing that it ripped with a natural sound.

"This should be equal to the amount of chakra I'll have to use on him," Sasuke said, sliding his hands into his pockets. She nodded.

"Okay," Sakura murmured. "I should be able to get a good idea from this." She tossed the grass into the air, watching the wind catch it and carry it for a few seconds. "There's only one thing I don't understand."

"Just say it," Sasuke replied. "This habit is irritating."

Sakura made a little face, but turned to the side to look at him. "It said you can't gain the first mangekyou without killing your closest friend--but Naruto's not dead."

Sasuke made a motion to pull his hands out of his pockets and fold his arms, but then stopped. ". . . If I'd managed to kill myself when I tried, I would have left him alone surrounded by what was left of the best of the Hidden Sound. No one should have survived that."

"Was that your intention?" Sakura asked, folding her arms. The motion made it look like she was interrogating Sasuke, who had refused to defensively fold his own arms, but in the back of her mind Sakura was painful aware that Sasuke controlled everything she was currently seeing and that there was no question who had the power here.

And the gesture might not matter, anyway, since Sasuke was still staring out at the dim blue ocean and not looking at her.

"No," Sasuke replied. "I." He made another motion with his hands, and Sakura saw that he was agitatedly tapping his fingers inside his pocket. "He--told me once that the people he takes control of don't . . . they leave remnants of their consciousnesses in his own."

Sasuke finally noticed his fingers, and pressed them flat. "I didn't want to live like that."

Sakura was still for a while, watching the grass sway in the breeze. Finally, she nodded slightly.

"Is that why it backlashes on you so badly when you use it?" she asked.

"Yes," Sasuke said shortly, and, "Don't tell him."

Sakura nodded again. "I promise. And I'll see what I can do about it."

Sasuke didn't bother to tell her that there was nothing to be done, and continued to gaze out at the sea. Soon, though, he frowned.

_Was it that color before?_

Sakura looked away from him again, to the right where the grass tapered down to a valley. "I'm glad you knew--the curse seal was aggravating it, but not to that extent. I couldn't figure out what I was missing."

"It's nothing, Lee," she heard herself say from behind her.

Sakura turned around to see herself in Lee's living room, applying antiseptic to a line of claw marks on her right forearm. Lee was holding her wrist gently, staring at the bleeding wounds with a worried look that mostly covered up a growing anger.

"But, Sakura--"

"Lee, _please_," she said. "If you start questioning his right to mark me, then it'll just start a whole fight about who's alpha male and we don't **need** this right now!"

Sakura watched as her words sunk in a moment later, and she let the hand holding the antiseptic drop. "Oh. . . ."

Lee wrapped his arms around her when she sunk against him, careful of where her arm fell. "Sakura?"

"I can't believe I said that so . . . this shouldn't. . . ." Sakura watched herself swallow thickly, watched Lee tighten his grip around her when she shuddered.

"I'm so glad I met you," she murmured against his chest. "Just . . . don't provoke him. Please."

_Sasuke couldn't have known about this_, Sakura thought to herself with a sick feeling, remembering the exact night that was now replaying in front of her--the second time Naruto had accidentally clawed her and the first time Lee had seen it. _He wasn't here_.

She realized someone was behind her, and turned around to tell Sasuke to release the genjutsu.

Naruto was sitting casually in the entryway. The deep, thick scars on his cheeks shifted when he smiled, but the expression wasn't reaching the slit pupils of his eyes.

"I hate seeing you with him," Naruto told her. "It was bad enough with Sasuke . . . but I would've put up with it, since you would've still been with us. But _he's_ taking you away."

"No," Sakura said quietly. "No, he's not, Naruto you know that. . . ."

Naruto stood up languidly, scratching the back of his neck with too-sharp nails. "C'mon, Sakura-chan," he said, still smiling, as he began to walk past her. "Can you really love him, and Ino, and us _too_? You're already pulling away from anyone you don't want to see who you've become."

_Don't turn around_!

The thought wasn't hers, she knew, because it was too far away.

_Don't_--_I'm trying to_--

Sakura knew the sound of skin ripping open, and she also knew the sound that Lee made when landing a spinning kick on someone.

She closed her eyes, even though it violated all her training as a kunoichi to keep her back to a fight, and pressed her hands into a seal.

_This is **genjutsu**, Sakura. You remember that? The technique you're **trained** in? Now stop sucking and get out of here_.

That thought **was** her own, because she recognized her sense of sarcasm. She tightened the interlocking of her fingers slightly when she heard the wet, thick sound of organs being pierced, and focused.

What happened next could only effectively be described as an explosion.

—

Sakura discovered that she was collapsed on the floor, face wet and head aching and arm burnt from where Naruto had forced chakra into her system. She managed to shove herself onto her forearms, and saw that Sasuke was hunched over as well with a hand pressed against his temple. She jerked back when Naruto knelt next to her.

"Sakura-chan! Are you okay?"

"Get away from her," Sasuke said roughly.

"No!" Sakura managed when Naruto turned to look at him. She grabbed the blond's fingers, squeezing them tightly.

"Sakura-chan?" Naruto asked, a little more quietly.

_No claws_, she thought to herself. _I did this. I know we have years until things get that bad again. Hinata-chan said we got all the strands. I trust Hinata-chan. Sasuke said he sealed the bad part. I trust Sasuke. Naruto said he'll never hurt us. I **trust** Naruto_.

"I'm okay," she said, and squeezed his fingers again lightly and let go. "Just--a little shaky. I'm okay."

Sakura pulled one of her arms over to rest her forehead on, because getting up was too disagreeable. "Okay. It looks like that jutsu can access people's memories to use their fears--" her breath strangled despite herself, and all she could manage for a moment was "_scary_."

"I'm sorry," Sasuke said. "My control slipped. It wasn't supposed to--"

"Yeah," she said, opening her eyes. "I think it happened because you got upset. Otherwi--"

"**What**?" Naruto snapped viciously. "Dammit, what'd you **do**!"

Sakura grabbed his arm before he could move. "It's okay!" she said as firmly as she could. She pulled herself up, using her grip on his arm. "We weren't fighting. I'm fine."

Naruto settled for glaring over at Sasuke, who wasn't paying attention due to still being hunched over. Sakura let go of Naruto's arm and waited until most of the dizziness and nausea had receded before asking, "It's not starting already, is it?"

"No," Sasuke replied, voice tight. "You and Naruto pushed chakra in at the same time I was trying to deactivate it. It'll pass."

Sasuke's face was pale. Sakura wondered if he had seen what she hadn't when she'd refused to turn around.

Then she shuddered and started wiping away her tears with her sleeve.

None of them spoke for a while, and finally Naruto went to the kitchen and came back with two glasses of water. Sasuke still hadn't moved, so Naruto set the glass on the floor next to him. Sakura had to clasp hers tightly, because her hands were still shaking.

"Stop that," she said with a small smile, when she noticed him watching her hands carefully. "It's not a big deal. My nervous system is just trying to tell me I'm still terrified." Sakura set the glass down carefully and studied her trembling hand. "That's kind of cool--in a fight, even if I hadn't collapsed from the mental attack, I still wouldn't be able to hold a weapon or throw properly."

"It's cheating," Naruto muttered.

"There's no such thing as cheating," Sasuke replied, finally looking over. Then he blinked, and held a hand up to his face. And then he swore under his breath and pressed the heel of his hand against the bridge of his nose.

Sakura shifted her legs beside her, leaning against the couch, and rested one hand on them with the other clutching her opposite elbow. "Is it the same, or worse?"

"Too early to tell," Sasuke replied. He swore again, and then muttered, "I'm never going to be able to use the Amaterasu after I gain it. What idiot medicnin recommended breeding this gene?"

"Oi," Sakura replied, "don't insult my profession just because you like to over-exert yourself."

"I didn't insult your profession, I insulted an idiot in it," Sasuke answered.

She picked up her water. "From what I've been able to tell, whenever you use a jutsu like the mangekyou or even the ordinary sharingan, it damages the cone cells in your eyes. It's still temporary now, but soon. . . ."

Sasuke nodded; he already knew.

"It doesn't seem to be affecting the rod cells as badly, though, or the chakra strands or rodopsin or optic nerve," she added. "So I think it's your fovea centralis that's going to go first."

Another nod from Sasuke. Naruto blinked at her and said, "His what?"

"It's the part of the eye that contains only cones," Sakura explained. "Those are what let us see in color and fine detail. Rods control vision in low light. The optic nerve is, you know, what connects the eye to the brain. As long as it's undamaged, and the retina continues to produce the chemical that changes light to electrical impulses, he'll still be able to see."

Sasuke made an irritated noise and picked up his cup. Naruto still looked a little lost on the details, but took Sakura's word and didn't ask for further explanation.

It was quiet again, bordering on uncomfortable, until Sakura thought of something. She shifted her legs to her other side and grinned.

"I guess eventually I'll have to proscribe you glasses!" she said cheerfully.

Sasuke looked at her over the rim of the cup.

"You might even have to wear bifocals by your mid-twenties," she added, still grinning.

"I am not wearing glasses," Sasuke said flatly.

Naruto draped an arm over the arm of the couch, grinning. "Hey, at least if you have those, you'll never have to worry about irritating girls hitting on you again! Four-eyes."

"Oh, come on," Sakura said, looking over at him. "If _any_one could make glasses look cool, it would be Sasuke."

"Glasses are not cool," Sasuke replied.

"Damn right," Naruto agreed.

Sasuke gave him an irritated look. "Shut up."

"_What?_" Naruto said theatrically, waving the hand thrown over the couch in the air. "I agreed with you!"

Sasuke refused to take the bait, and took another sip of water.

"Of course, you'll have to readjust your whole fighting style to incorporate them," Sakura said thoughtfully. "It'd suck if you died because your glasses fell off in a fight."

"I am **not** wearing glasses," Sasuke repeated.

—

Sasuke only managed to stay sitting for a few more minutes, but Sakura passed out first.

"You need to get a doctor to look at her," Sasuke said tiredly, from where he was stretched out on the floor. "Her chakra system has to be stabilized before she'll be okay."

"How?" Naruto replied, setting Sakura on the quilt. "We're quarantined."

"Flag one of the anbu," Sasuke answered, closing his eyes. "They won't attack in the middle of the day unless they just want to slaughter this place. And if she's sending that message out for a real onmyouji, then word should get back and they'll have to change their plans."

Sasuke's voice had been slowing down as he spoke. Naruto watched him out of the corner of his eyes. "What're we supposed to tell them?"

"What else?" Sasuke replied.

When Sasuke fell asleep, Naruto moved him onto the couch, then got the pillow from the bedroom and tucked it under Sakura's head. He hid the metal box in his small closet, and piled as much junk on top of it as he could find. The he went back to the front room and paced a lot, stopping in front of the door or the window and then changing his mind.

_She said someone would contact us_, he told himself, and went to shake Sakura awake.

"Whaaaaat?" she whined irritatedly once he managed to get her conscious.

"I didn't think you were supposed to sleep," he said, sitting next to the bed and giving her a grin.

"It's not a concussion, Naruto," she said wearily. She shook her head slightly, and pushed herself up on a forearm. "How's he?"

"Asleep," Naruto answered, pointing to the couch.

"Muh," Sakura said, flopping back onto the quilt. "Are any of the anbu good? You need to get a message to Kakashi-sensei; we need that medicine."

Naruto shook his head. "All the masks I could see belong to unfriendly ones."

"And Oukei's still on forced vacation. . . ." Sakura yawned and closed her eyes, even as her voice remained worried. "We might have to use one of them anyway . . . he'll start getting a fever soon. . . ."

After she fell back asleep, Naruto scrounged through the kitchen until he found a rag. He ran it under cold water and put it on Sasuke's forehead, before waking Sakura up again.

By the time there was a knock at the door, he'd changed the rag three times, paced so much that the downstairs neighbors had banged on the ceiling, and had woken Sakura up enough that she'd stopped trying to convince him she could sleep and had started swearing. The latest time, she punched him in the shoulder hard enough to bruise for a few minutes.

Naruto never had been and never would be as glad to see Lee as he was when he opened the door.

"Gai-sensei told me--" and that was as far as Lee got before Naruto yanked him into the apartment.

"Can you do me a favor?" Naruto said. He let go of Lee's arm, and the other teenager went to Sakura, shifting the small sack he was carrying. "Go to Kakashi-sensei's and ask him for the headache medicine he has. And . . . damn, not her--and get Shizune. Not anyone else, but her? And ask her to come here?"

"What happened?" Lee asked, checking Sakura's pulse and looking over at him.

Naruto crouched midway between the couch and the quilt, facing Lee. "It's a long story. I need you to do it fast."

Lee looked back down at Sakura, then over at Sasuke. Then he nodded and stood up.

He held the sack out to Naruto. "I brought this for Sakura . . . if she wakes up before I get back, will you tell her about it?"

"Yeah," he said, taking it. "Hurry."

The anbu let Lee leave again with a minimum of arguing, which Naruto listened to through the shuttered window.

The sack was open, so once Lee had been allowed to pass, Naruto glanced inside. It held a dress and Sakura's medical pack and spare weapons pouch, and on top of those, a toothbrush and toothpaste.

Naruto smiled faintly when he saw those, and took the sack to the bathroom. Then he came back and shook Sakura awake, only to get punched once more for his trouble.

—

She'd fallen asleep again before Kakashi arrived, looking like he'd come straight out of bed after falling into it after a mission--which, as Naruto learned, was the case. He managed to explain a majority of what had happened before Lee returned with Shizune.

When Shizune shook Sakura awake, she caught the teenager's fist with the ease of someone who'd spent years traveling with a very strong woman who liked to drink. "_Up_, Sakura-kun."

"Shizune-sa--?" Sakura pushed herself up quickly, and then closed her eyes at the rush of dizziness. "Sorry! I thought you were Naruto."

"Hrm," Shizune replied, holding back a smile. "You shouldn't assault people looking out for your welfare."

"He wouldn't let me sleep . . ." Sakura replied half-heartedly, rubbing at her eyes before opening them.

Shizune immediately checked her pupils. When she let go of her chin, Sakura's gaze drifted over to the right, where Lee and Naruto were standing.

And then she was hit with the harsh, gutting _memory_ of what had happened in that illusion, so visceral that she shuddered as violently as if it were a spasm.

Shizune pressed a hand against her back, the other bracing her shoulder. "Sakura-kun?"

"It's nothing," she said quickly, closing her eyes. "Dizzy."

Shizune gave her a disbelieving look, which wasn't effective since Sakura still hadn't opened her eyes. Kakashi looked over from where he'd been standing by Sasuke, gauging what Sakura had looked at based on the angle of her face.

A moment later, he made a hand motion and caught Naruto's attention. Kakashi pointed to the kitchen, and soon Naruto caught on and dragged Lee out of the room.

Shizune ignored it all. "Now, what happened?"

"I had Sasuke test the mangekyou on me," Sakura replied quietly. "I wanted to--"

"I see," Shizune interrupted. "Then, lie down and don't exert yourself any further. I'm going to start stabilizing your chakra--tell me the rest when I'm finished."

"Yes," Sakura murmured, and lay back down.

—

It took Shizune the better part of an hour to finish her work. During that time, Kakashi managed to shake Sasuke awake long enough to get him to swallow three pills, which the man took as an excellent sign. Sasuke fell back asleep again afterward, but he only had a low-grade fever and he wasn't too unconscious to respond to physical stimulus, so it was better than the last time.

By the time Sasuke woke up for good, Sakura was almost finished explaining to Shizune what had happened, and Naruto had run out of excuses to keep himself and Lee out of the room. All five of them noticed that Sakura didn't look at either Lee or Naruto the whole time she spoke, but only Kakashi and Sasuke understood why.

(Sakura refused to describe what she had seen in the mangekyou, and chose her words with such vagueness that Shizune eventually rolled her eyes and quit asking.)

"Do I even need to tell you how foolish this was?" the woman said when she finished, sitting back.

Sakura folded her hands in her lap. "No, Shizune-san."

"Good." Shizune let the word hang there for a moment, before letting out a breath and tilting her head.

"Next time, contact me or someone else first," she said. "Don't try to do these things on your own."

"Yes," Sakura said.

"You can't attempt to gauge something so unknown as the mangekyou sharingan without knowing more about it," Shizune added. "I expected you to know better. _Any_thing could have happened. And as for the **timing**. . . ."

Sakura interlocked her fingers and didn't reply.

Shizune studied her for a moment, and then glanced at Sasuke from the corner of her eye. He, however, had his eyes closed and was slumped against the corner of the couch, revealing nothing.

"Don't make more trouble for yourself, Sakura-kun," Shizune said a moment later, standing up. She looked down. "Is there anything else you want me to say when I go back?"

Sakura shook her head. "That's everything that happened."

"That isn't what I asked," Shizune replied.

"No," Sakura said, firmly but not looking up. "I have nothing else to add."

"Hm," Shizune said with a small nod, and left.

When she was gone, Sasuke opened his eyes, glaring at the door. They were still in the sharingan. "She suspects."

"Shizune-san is smart," Sakura replied.

"Will she report it?" he asked.

"Don't be paranoid," Naruto said. "She didn't ask a bunch of questions or anything."

"Don't make that mistake," Sakura interjected, stretching out her legs. "Shizune-san's first loyalty is to Tsunade-sensei."

Sasuke let out an irritated breath.

"This is why people are talking about you guys being too close," Kakashi said evenly, reminding them that he was still leaning against the wall beside the couch. "You're keeping more secrets than is appropriate for a team."

They didn't reply.

Kakashi waited for a minute, and then pushed away from the wall, unfolding his arms. "You should start forgetting in a few years," he told Sakura, not indicating either Naruto or Lee.

". . . Okay," Sakura murmured. ". . . Thank you."

"You probably shouldn't offer information on yourself to someone who controls a jutsu like that," he added casually.

Sasuke hunched in on himself slightly. Sakura started to bite her lip, and then stopped. "It wasn't deliberate on his part."

Kakashi nodded. "All the more reason not to, then."

—

Kakashi left not long after, tired and injured visibly enough from his latest mission that Sakura insisted he at least get more sleep and rebandage the wound on his arm before coming back.

Lee excused himself several minutes after that--having learned that none of them had eaten since last night--with the intention of going back to his and Sakura's apartment to get enough food to make a decent lunch.

That left the three of them alone in the apartment again; but it didn't feel the same as before, now that other people had come and gone. They sat in silence for a while, Sakura on the futon, Sasuke on the couch, and Naruto on the floor, leaning against the old stove that stood less than half a meter from his bedroom door. They'd said so much, quantity-wise, to each other in the last day that it felt like there was nothing left.

So they all started a little when Sasuke spoke, including himself.

"Do you remember your dreams?" he asked Sakura.

She blinked and then frowned at him. "What do you mean?"

"Do you recall them well, or not?"

"Ah . . . not, I guess," she said. "They're usually pretty blurry."

He nodded. "It should be sooner, then."

Sakura nodded slowly for a moment, and then let out her breath in an almost-laugh.

"I'll be fine," she said. "I've had worse nightmares. This one time. . . ."

She trailed off, and then held up her hands. She made a little shaping motion with them as she spoke.

"A couple weeks after Tsunade-sensei started training me in torture, we caught this group of Mistnins. The rest of them were killed afterward, but Tsunade-sensei decided to send one back to make it clear that we knew about their alliance with the Sound." Sakura shifted on the quilt, pulling her legs up to her chest and letting her arms drop over them. "She'd . . . been really generous with my training before. It took me a couple weeks to stop throwing up all the time, and she didn't make me actually do any of it for a long time . . . except realigning a broken bone wrong, but that was later . . . just had me learn through watching. But eventually I had to pro--show that I'd learned and that I would be able to use it later, so the one we left alive, it was decided to break his thumbs and wait a few days before sending him back so that he wouldn't be able to handle weapons for a long time."

Sakura stopped for a moment, until she felt she could continue without trying to string all her words into one long sentence and therefore get it over with. Sasuke was watching her with an impassive expression, and Sakura found it much easier to concentrate on him than to turn and see what the look on Naruto's face would be.

"So I broke his thumbs," she said, with a small, casual gesture. "I passed, but later Tsunade-sensei decided to cut his tongue down the middle, too, before he was escorted back. She was busy meeting with the clan heads, so it was supposed to be Shizune-san's job; but I had her take me with her and let me do it." Sakura folded her hands over her knees. "I was angry at myself because my hands shook the other time."

"That was pointless," Sasuke said. "Unless you cut his hands off, he could still eventually write down whatever she didn't want known."

"Write dow . . . oh, no," Sakura explained. "He hadn't overheard anything important. He had just insulted us a lot."

Sasuke blinked once, then again more slowly, but said nothing.

"Even that wasn't as bad as that Soundnin who cut _out_ her tongue," Sakura added. "That one was my fault. The other one, the male, Tsunade-sensei left him with me because Jiraiya-san came to meet her in the middle of it, and I told him I would give him some rosary peas--they're extremely poisonous--if he would tell me what had happened to you."

Sasuke shifted on the couch, and Sakura pushed her hair back again, blocking his view of her face.

"He said you'd been training, but Jiraiya-san and Tsunade-sensei had been coming back down the hall right then, and the side effects of the peas are really obvious. . . ." She dropped her hand from her hair and brought it back to her knees, intertwining her fingers and then tilting her palms out.

Sakura was aware that she was fidgeting uncontrollably, but even the small noise of her motions helped hide the fact that Naruto hadn't said a word.

"So I hid them again," she confessed. "And because of that, he didn't break later when Tsunade-sensei tried to bargain, like he would have. That gave the girl plenty of time to bleed to death--she'd tried to sever her wrist, too, before she must have fallen unconscious. And Shizune-san told me later that they barely got back to the boy in time before he could slash his femoral artery. They never found where he'd hid that damn blade--he wouldn't talk."

"The rope," Sasuke said, and Sakura looked over at him. His face was still impassive, and she was grateful for that favor--even if he didn't have the right to judge her, anyway. "At the back, there's a small slot in the fibers to hide it in. The knot of the bow obscures the visibility."

Sakura shook her head. "They were wearing genin clothes, though. We caught them in the village."

Sasuke paused for a moment, and then said, "It would have been folded into the forehead protectors, then." He touched his own, fingers just above the etching of the leaf. "You can scrape it off against a wall or the floor, and then unfold the cloth with your teeth and get it around to your hands. Unless you were chained to a wall."

". . . That's brilliant," Sakura said, impressed despite everything. "We rarely remove the forehead protector, since it's an additional reminder that they're an enemy. Plus, there's not much you can do with the scalp without getting blood everywhere. Punching's crude, and electrical burns so close to the brain are--this is stupid."

She stood up abruptly. "Are you thirsty?" she asked neither of them in particular, heading to the kitchen. "I am."

Naruto reached out and caught her leg when she started to pass by him, pulling. When Sakura sunk with a yelp and a reflexive motion toward a weapons pouch she wasn't wearing, he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her over.

"I'm sorry," Naruto said roughly, pressing his forehead against the nape of her neck. "I didn't do _any_thing. I didn't even _notice_. I'm sorry, Sakura-chan." His arms tightened.

She wasn't sure what to say.

On the couch, Sasuke had shifted forward to the edge, but he had stilled once Naruto spoke. Sakura stared down at the scarred wood flooring for several long moments before she thought of swallowing and speaking.

She placed a hand over Naruto's arm, and patted it a moment later. "I was doing my best not to _let_ you know," she said gently. "The only person I ever told was--was Lee. Even my parents and Ino still don't know. It's okay."

Naruto was silent for almost a full minute before saying, "Sasuke knew."

"I figured it out on my own," Sasuke replied.

"Both of you, you talk to each other and you don't tell me shit." He glared at the other teenager over Sakura's shoulder. "I'm not that fucking perceptive, okay? If you won't **tell** me stuff, I can't **do** anything about it!"

Sakura didn't give Sasuke time to respond. "It's not that," she said, rubbing her thumb against Naruto's arm in what she hoped was a calming gesture. "It's not like that, Naruto. It's. . . ." She bit the tip of her tongue slightly, and then went on. "It's easier for me to tell Sasuke some things, because I don't . . . his opinion doesn't matter to me as much as yours does."

She looked up at Sasuke. "And the same goes for Sasuke. Right?"

He was staring down at the floor himself, now; but he didn't deny what she said.

They stayed like that for a few minutes, and Naruto let Sakura continue to rub her thumb absently against his skin.

When he let go, it was as abrupt at the first movement, and he pushed himself back a little against the stove to give her room. "Lee brought you some stuff," Naruto said. "Toothpaste, and weapons and a dress."

"Toothpaste!" Sakura said gleefully, standing up. "Thank you!"

"Yeah." Naruto jerked a thumb toward the bedroom doorway. "I put it on the sink."

He looked at Sasuke once she'd left the room, but the other teenager was already up and peering the traps along the window again.

—

Lee was back a quarter of an hour later, with enough food for into breakfast tomorrow. He lectured Naruto on the masculinity of keeping a clean and healthy kitchen, while Sakura and Sasuke argued over his ability to see well enough to chop the vegetables.

If they ignored the tripwire along the window and the hidden anbu guard outside, it was like a normal meal.


	20. ripple 20: Konoha

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

This is actually half of what was supposed to be the last chapter. If it feels like it ends abruptly, that's why--I didn't like having to halve the chapter, but it was just too long.

I leave Itachi and Sasuke's last fight up to Kishimoto.  
——————

**-'**

Like all expected battles, a few hours beforehand everything began moving too fast to be properly understood.

The onmyouji from Lightning country hadn't arrived by the time that a report--bloodstained and uncoded--came in from an outside scout that probable Akatsuki members were on their way. Sasuke was bullied into making rough wards for the Inuzuka family.

"It's stupid," he told Sakura, as she helped him dry the wards and box them to be carried over. "You have to be born with this kind of power, and you can't _rush_ the process. If they have any affect on the fox spirits, it'll be because they hate dogs, not because of these."

"Well," Sakura said, "at least it won't feel like we're relying solely on Kakashi-sensei's dogs."

"False comfort," Sasuke replied, and went to put out the fire.

Even so, he'd made extras. Sasuke gave Sakura two of the ofuda for herself and Lee, and pocketed the last three for himself, Naruto, and Kakashi.

The Sand siblings had shown up with no warning or notice, and for a while there had been the suspicion that _they_ were possessed. After that rumor was put to rest, a new one started circulating that their arrival was somehow connected to Shikamaru; but by the time that started getting confirmed, Sakura was busy explaining to the Inuzukas what Sasuke had told her about the wards and Sasuke and Naruto were in a more deserted area of the village with Kakashi, summoning their animals.

The majority of snakes that answered when Sasuke summoned them were vipers, with a few cobras and a garden snake. Sasuke was glad to see a second Gaboon viper besides Kyomamushi--those had the longest fangs, and when (if) they shook off their lethargy enough to attack, the venom could kill a grown man in fifteen minutes or less.

"Hello, Gamakouchi," one of the cobras said to a large horned toad. "Haven't seen _you_ in a few decades, since that Valley of the End mess."

Sasuke glanced over at Naruto. He shrugged a shoulder, looking confused as well.

The frog took a drink from the jug slung over its back before it deigned to reply. "Don't be cocky, dirt-eater. You're only alive because Jiraiya didn't want us to kill him."

"Foolish," the cobra replied with a verbal smirk, curling around once and lashing its tail.

"How long are we supposed to stay in this nest of toads and vipers?" a rottweiler asked loudly. A basenji, sitting beside it, agreed with a throaty whine. Both the snakes and the frogs made irritated noises.

The dogs had all moved to higher ground when Naruto and Sasuke had summoned their animals. Kakashi was sitting on a wall above them as well. "Not long," he replied, and began explaining about the expected situation of the upcoming battle, and how the animals needed to be on the lookout for people who were probably possessed and to chase them away from others whenever possible. The dogs and toads listened. The snakes didn't.

After the dogs had taken off, and the toads had managed to leave without turning their backs on the snakes, Nahash lifted its head.

"What do _you_ request, child?" it said.

"There will be two--maybe more--people coming here, wearing black cloaks with red clouds. I ask that you kill them." Sasuke paused, and then added, "Except for the man who looks like me."

"Can we maim him?" Kyomamushi asked.

"Bring him to me," Sasuke replied.

"Maimed?"

Sasuke adjusted the katana on his back, fingers lingering on the hilt for a moment. Then: "Yes," he said. "Maimed. If you can manage it--don't get yourselves killed."

Kyomamushi flicked out his tongue with a little amused motion. "Got it." It uncurled and turned around. "I told you he'd grow up," it added to the other snakes, before slithering off. The rest followed.

"Damn things," Sasuke muttered when they were out of earshot. Behind him, Naruto was snickering.

—

Less than an hour later, the twenty-five who would be possessed began to be taken over by violent seizures. Itachi had shown a remarkable knowledge of village relationships, if no understanding of them, and gave Sen--the Cloud missingnin--the names of not only anbu and jounin but also chuunin and genin who would cause a significant amount of damage and emotional grief to those who would be fighting them.

Gai, Jiraiya, Chouji, Neji, and Iruka were some of the first to be fully possessed.

—

Paranoia was a typical part of ninja wars, but it was twice as bad this time. The foxes couldn't access people's memories, so the only real way to verify who a person was was to question them about something personal, and hope they didn't attack you in the moment you took to do so.

The three of them hadn't managed to meet up with Sakura again before the fighting began, and Sasuke had slipped away from Kakashi as soon as he saw the opportunity. Naruto had followed him, but Jiraiya came up not long after and said that Tsunade had ordered they be kept separate lest they blow up half the village if one of them became possessed (neither Sasuke nor Sakura had mentioned the extra ofuda to her, and Naruto didn't get a chance to tell Jiraiya), and dragged Naruto off with him. Sasuke ran across Anko while he'd been looking for Sakura, and sneered at her about still using clove soap, at which point Anko mocked him for still pretending that he hadn't had sex with Orochimaru, and then they nodded to each other and might have gone separate ways had they not been attacked.

Sasuke had wanted to find Sakura because, regardless of how much stronger and better at planning she had become, the fact that Tsunade had kept her missions cloistered in Fire country meant that she lacked the practical battle experience that he and Naruto had gleaned. But when several people began to attack him and Anko--or just one person with several clones, since they stayed hidden in the shadows--he briefly hoped that she was staying close to Lee, and then pushed it out of his mind and concentrated on not dying.

None of it mattered much, anyway, since the bitter chakra of the fox demon lashed across the village a few minutes later.

Sasuke jumped over one of Anko's snakes--they weren't summons, but pets that she had raised, so they weren't flexible in fights around anyone else--and landed a few steps from her. The only attacks were coming from the north and the southwest shadows, now, so he kept his focus on the latter.

"Can he control that much of it?" Anko called back, watching the north.

"No," Sasuke replied.

Anko shifted her footing so that she could see both areas in her peripheral vision. "Beat it, then," she said. "Don't get your ass possessed."

He didn't bother to tell her about Tsunade's order. Sasuke watched on the area to the southwest for a few moments, but there was no motion he could see. "Don't die," he said shortly, and then sprang away from the area. He barely heard her give a throaty, 'not damn likely' laugh before he was out of hearing range.

The chakra was outside the village walls. Sasuke didn't waste breath swearing, and kept as low as he could.

He spotted two jounin fighting with taijutsu in the street a head of him--one that he vaguely remembered had taught a few classes at school, and the other whose face he couldn't see. Sasuke kept a slight track of fight as he moved to pass it, saw that the jounin with his back to him was moving jerkily, and sacrificed a shuriken, aiming it between the third and fourth vertebrae of the man's spine. He then slid down the opposite side of the roof, so that the first jounin wouldn't be able to catch his face.

Naruto's chakra had almost doubled in little more than a minute--what the fuck were they _doing_ to him? Sasuke jumped off the roof, used the wall of an opposite building as a springboard, and leap to another roof a few meters away, clinging to the shadows offered by an overhang.

A kunai hit him in the back, below his left shoulder blade.

The attack threw him forward, and Sasuke forced the momentum into a roll, shoving himself back onto his feet and clenching his jaw as the weapon cut flesh and muscle with the motion. If he was fast enough, it'd be someone else's problem, he had to get--

"Still running, little brother?"

Sasuke's feet skidded on the shingles.

—

In the end, Sasuke won the fight for one reason and one reason alone: the snakes had obeyed him.

Itachi's right wrist was crushed and roughly bound with one of the wrappings from Kisame's sword, his left calf was only slightly less damaged, and three different snakes had managed to get venom into his blood before being killed. It said something about the difference between them that Sasuke still had to resort to the second level of the curse seal before the end.

The curse seal was ripping chakra out of him faster than usual, and Sasuke vaguely guessed it was because he was bleeding so profusely. The blood loss was bad enough that it was making him dizzy, and his eyes were burning . . . except that could be the sharingan, Sasuke wasn't sure. He only knew that the area around them was blurring into indistinct patches of red, and Itachi was crystal clear in front of him, blood flecking his lips and Sasuke's katana buried one rib too low to have killed him immediately.

_It can't . . . is this it?_ Sasuke wondered blankly, frozen in place. One wing had curled around automatically, to protect his throat and chest while he started at Itachi. _This is it?_

Itachi coughed once, and then spat blood to the side, not taking his eyes off the vestige of what remained familiar in Sasuke's face.

"I expected too much of you," he said quietly.

Then, still staring, he reached out and grabbed the hand clenched around the katana's hilt, and yanked Sasuke closer.

_No_, he thought, _not again_, but it was already too late, the color of the world was inverting itself and becoming distinguishable once more.

—

It was the entrance hall of his former home, but there was no blood. The doors to the surrounding porch had been opened, letting in the sunlight and a gentle breeze, and Sasuke felt very cold.

He made his way to the porch and began walking along it. He was moving louder than he wanted to: if Sasuke had it his way, he would have been walking on the outsides of his feet, and distributing his weight better over the old wood slats, but instead he padded barefoot down the porch as if he were safe here.

Before he reached the corner, he turned and went inside the doorway that led to the kitchen, then passed through that and into the hallway that led to the inner rooms.

It was warmer near the center of the house--their father, like his father before him and _his_ father before _him_, had seen no reason to muck up the ancestral home by installing air conditioning, even though some of the lesser relatives' houses and most of the other buildings had it. Sasuke had learned there was no use complaining to the man, but once he had harassed Itachi to agree that when _he_ became clan head, he would install it. Itachi had laughed and promised to think about it.

Sasuke knew the room that his feet stopped at before he even heard the faint clink of metal. When he slid open the door, Itachi was strapping on the left arm guard of his anbu uniform. He didn't shift away from his position in front of the mirror when the door opened, but Sasuke knew he saw him--for a moment, there was a trace of a smile on his face, the greeting he had always given Sasuke when he didn't feel like speaking.

"You're dead," Sasuke said, stepping into the room. "You're dying. I killed you."

Itachi glanced over long enough to give him an indulgent look.

"You're **dead**!" he snarled, hands clenching into fists. "You failed! Just--**die**!"

"Little brother," Itachi answered, tightening the strap of the guard and letting his hand fall, "you missed the point of everything."

"I understood," Sasuke said tightly. "You wanted me for the Amaterasu. I stayed alive for your sake. I understood _perfectly_."

Itachi was still smiling faintly, and Sasuke had to remind himself that that mouth had been spitting blood just a few minutes ago, to keep himself from diving forward and punching it.

Not that he could have anyway. But at least this way, he could pretend it was his own decision not to move.

"You mistook me," Itachi replied. He picked up the mask and turned to face Sasuke. "Do you still intend to 'revive your clan'?"

"I--what's . . . you don't _care_, just _**die**!_"

"Foolish," Itachi said, walking towards the door. "You can _try_, little brother, but it's pointless."

When he passed Sasuke, he rested a hand on his shoulder, and dug his blunt nails into Orochimaru's curse seal. Sasuke winced.

"You are no longer an Uchiha, after all."

Itachi let his hand drop, and walked past, slipping on his mask.

Sasuke shuddered once, after the cool hand was gone, and then turned sharply. "You--!"

Itachi flicked a finger at his forehead, causing Sasuke to freeze in silent rage. "Tomorrow," he said, voice slightly muffled by the mask, and then closed the door behind him.

Sasuke swiped a wrist roughly against his forehead, reaching out to grab the handle, and the skin caught and tore.

The rest of Sasuke froze again, even as his fingers grabbed the torn area and pulled. The skin came off easily--it was paper-thin, fragile, he remembered it, he'd felt it before, shedding beneath his hands, once when he'd landed an open-palmed chakra attack on Orochimaru, other times when. . . .

The delicate skin ripped when it got past his cheekbone, and Sasuke stared down at it. It was getting harder to breathe.

_No_. . . .

The mirror was behind him.

_No, no, no, no, no, **no**_. . . .

He was turning toward it even though he didn't want to. . . .

_No, no, no, please brother, not this, not him, **please**, **stop **it, **no**_. . . .

But he could already see the reflection.

—

It was bright when he woke up.

The room had no curtains, so the late afternoon sunlight was reflected on the far wall and part of the ceiling. Sasuke stared at it for a while, watching the blurry reddish light fade a little as the sun sank lower.

Then he clenched his hands into fists, noting that there was a sharpness in the back of his left hand.

"Every time," he said, roughly. He squeezed his fists, ignoring the increased tightness around the IV needle. "Every _time_. . . ."

There was a shift below his feet. Sasuke lifted his head high enough to see a lump of snake and bandages.

Sitting up wasn't easy: his back hurt, his shoulder ached, his eyes were killing him, and he had to drag the IV pole forward a half a meter before he was fully up so that it wouldn't tip over. Kyomamushi was curled gingerly around the foot of the bed, with its middle half swathed in bandages. Its eyes were closed, but it spoke before Sasuke could ask.

"That filthy dog vet managed not to kill me while she was 'treating' the cut," it said caustically, before adding, "and the tree-girl has a message for you."

"Saku. . . ." Sasuke rested more of his weight on his less bandaged arm. "What is it?"

Kyomamushi opened an eye. "Good news about the fox."

Sasuke blinked at him.

He understood a minute later, and ripped out the IV needle before throwing himself out of the bed and stumbling towards the door.

Compared to the quiet, pale-ish pink room, the hallway was an explosion of noise and shades of red. Sasuke had to close his eyes before he had taken half a dozen steps, slumping against the wall and pressing the heel of his palm hard against the bridge of his nose.

Footsteps. "Uchiha. . . ." A male voice, didn't finish the sentence, irritation almost covering the trepidation. Sasuke yanked his hand away and glared at the source.

"Where's Naruto?"

He couldn't make out the man's expression, but he could see him stop short. That and the silence said enough. Sasuke shoved away from the wall and started making his way down the hall in the opposite direction. He had to keep bracing himself against the wall, or more often the gurneys and chairs and trays lined against it. Behind him, the man ran off, calling something that got lost in all the noise around him.

All so fucking **bright**--he couldn't even see the shapes properly, so why did it feel like the reds were trying to _blind_ him? Bright and loud and _irritating!_

"Where's Naruto?" he snarled at the next person who tried to stop him, and pushed past him when they froze as well.

He made it another meter down the corridor before a woman planted herself firmly in front of him, hands at chest level. A seal--rat or serpent, he couldn't tell.

"Uchiha-san," she said firmly, and it was too blurry--_damn this!_--to read her body language. "You're still injured. Please return to your room and I'll get a doctor."

Sasuke could see two people, mostly hidden behind the growing crowd, who'd already activated their chakra. They weren't moving yet. "Where's Sakura?" he snarled at the woman. "Where's _Naruto?_"

"Dead," said a voice behind him.

Sasuke swung around. Sakura was there, and behind her were three more people who'd activated their chakra. None of them were going to move at him yet, they were still stationary--no, the one on the far left was going to feint right while reaching for the weapons pouch on his hip, what was there in the area that Sasuke could use to block it--

"Naruto's dead," Sakura repeated.

This time, it sunk in.

Sasuke stared at her, throat constricting. ". . . What?"

"He's dead," she said for the third time, tucking a piece of hair beneath the protector tied around her forehead before stepping forward. "Come on, Sasuke, we don't have time for this. Come back to your room."

Her voice was too casual, forcedly too casual, and when she set a hand on his shoulder, she moved it past his face close enough that he could see she was shaking.

It didn't match up. Even if . . . did it mean . . . it **had** to mean. . . .

"Come on," she whispered, barely audible, and tugged him forward, "later, later, come _on_."

One of the three people in front of him had released their chakra. The other two were going to move aside.

Sasuke clenched his right hand into a fist, and then strode forward, trying to move fast enough that his own shaking wouldn't be noticeable. Sakura had to shift quickly to get out of his way, but she caught up within a few seconds and followed him down the hall.

People moved aside. Sasuke didn't know if it was because of him or because she was gesturing for them to, and didn't care.

"This one," she said soon, catching his elbow when he walked past the room and then dodging the reflexive slam backward. "This door."

She shut it behind her, and didn't move away. "Sit on the bed, you're swaying all over the place."

Sasuke didn't move. "He's not--"

Sakura pressed a finger to her lips, but half a second later she also shook her head. Sasuke was still for long enough to notice that it was getting easier to breathe, and then moved to the bed.

"Then why di--"

Sakura pressed a finger more vehemently to her lips, and added a glare. She was still standing beside the door.

Sasuke exhaled harshly, but waited. He threw a glare at Kyomamushi, but the viper merely flicked its tongue out once, lazily, and didn't open its eyes.

"Were they expecting me to wake up today?" he asked, forcing himself to change the topic. "Or did you just happen to be on the same floor?"

Sakura laughed, but it sounded more like a tired exhalation. "I was on the floor below, but Mogusa-san came running down." She threw the viper a dark look. "I get Hinata-chan to ask Kiba to harass his sister into taking care of you, and you repay the favor by sending Sasuke out like _that?_"

"I only told him the truth," it replied.

Sakura gave it a highly skeptical look, and Sasuke made a gesture telling her to drop it. She glared back at the door, but when he remained silent, she managed a small half-smile. "Don't worry, you probably could have thrown someone into a _wall_, and you _still_ wouldn't have been as creepy as Gaara was, when he. . . ."

"He's here?"

"He was," she replied. "The group from the Sand was only here unofficially, and they decided to . . . return to Suna, after he learned. Just in case an attack was aimed there, as well, you know?"

"What'd he do?"

"Nothing," she said quietly. "He . . . after the ru--news spread around, he came here and starting asking if it was true." She fidgeted with the needle tucked into the band of her sloppy ponytail, the sole weapon she had on her besides the gloves in the back of her belt. "It should have been Tsunade-sama that spoke to him, or Shizune-san, but they were both in surgeries . . . so one of the clerks got me. This was before the story got around," she added, with a bitterness that told Sasuke this was a different subject. He squinted, trying to get a less blurry view.

"And I told him it was true," she said. "And he stared for . . . about a minute, I guess, and then he turned and walked away. And that's when Temari-san gave the explanation for returning to Suna, and Shikamaru went to wait for Tsunade-sama to get out of the surgery, in case they stayed long enough for her to thank them formally . . . well, that was the excuse, I'm sure Kankuro-san and Temari-san got him out of here immediately, but she needed to know so we'd understand the situation for dealing with them later on. . . ."

Sakura laid a hand against the door, turning towards it slightly. Her voice dropped further.

"He was so quiet, I could hear that sand rattling the whole . . . I've never seen Temari-san so nervous before," she murmured. "I didn't think she _could_ look like that."

She stood there, listening at the door, for another half a minute. But finally she stepped away from it, walking around to the far side of the bed to look out the windows.

"What happened?" Sasuke demanded, and didn't need to clarify.

"Akatsuki got him," she replied. "Jiraiya was one of the possessed ones, it looks like he brought him almost straight to them--" she paused for a few moments, while Sasuke swore violently under his breath "--and they . . . whatever they did, it looks like it wiped out the seal you did, and it might have . . . might've cracked the Fourth's . . . that's what it looks like, at least--"

"But he's alive?"

She nodded. "He's alive."

Sasuke's voice abruptly grew harsher. "Then why the **fuck**--"

"Because Tsunade and Jiraiya have decided to kill him."

Sasuke slung himself around so he was sitting on the side of the bed facing her, ignoring the dizziness and the annoyed hiss from Kyomamushi. "_Why!_"

"Because a weapon's no use if it's as likely to kill you as your enemy," Sakura said viciously, glaring out the window. Then, after a moment, her tone diminished. "You need to see him, Sasuke. It's . . . like we never did that surgery at all."

Sasuke let his breath out in a long hiss, because it was the only option besides ripping the sheet in half or punching the wall. Sakura didn't say any more; she was staring out the window as if transfixed.

After a while, more to herself than anything, she murmured, "I can't believe four people did **this**. Just four. . . . It's inhuman."

"Isn't there _any_thing--?"

"No." Sakura shook her head, and then absently fixed the needle when it started to slip. "They were going to kill him right then, but . . . I . . . asked her to let us say goodbye. But as far as the village is concerned, he was killed in the fighting."

That tone was back, though not as bitter as before. Sasuke was quiet for another moment, and then said, "Why are you wearing your forehead protector like that?"

She looked over at him.

"It's blurry," he said, "not blind."

"Geez . . ." Sakura murmured, with a sound that might have been impressed in a different time. Then she looked over at the viper and asked "Can we trust it?" in a voice that made it clear she didn't. Kyomamushi flicked its tongue out again, eyes still closed.

"He's the only one," Sasuke replied.

She nodded a few times, slowly, and then closed the curtains. "I did something really stupid."

She dragged the chair that had been sitting against the far wall over to that side of the bed, then sat down and started untying the knot. "I miscalculated how much of Naruto was left."

Sasuke was spared from trying to react to that, because she'd pulled the protector off and he could see a small spot of darker red in the middle of her forehead. He leaned forward until he could see that it was teardrop-shaped, and then squinted and realized that it wasn't a teardrop but a deformed diamond. And--though he couldn't get closer without bashing his nose into hers to confirm it--the skin around it looked puckered, like a healed burn.

"There's this jutsu," Sakura said, and Sasuke sat back. "It can heal the worst damage, anything, but it does it by accelerating cell life rapidly." She started twisting the cloth in her hands. "Tsunade refused to ever teach it to me, she said it would only encourage me to take life-threatening risks, but I found it hidden in the forbidden scrolls cabinet. . . ."

She jerked the cloth sharply, pulling it taut. "I should have guessed it was in code. I should have . . . but she'd never done anything like that before, and I thought. . . . And then, after Naruto--after _it_--. . . after, I was . . . I could see Lee running over but I couldn't get enough air to tell him to stop, and Shizune-san was distracted and I kept bleeding too much to keep my hands focused and it _hurt_. . . ."

Sakura shook her head once, sharply, and started twisting the cloth again. "It's my fault. I should have known it was coded, but I panicked."

"You were dying," Sasuke replied.

"I **panicked**."

"It's the same thing."

Sakura was quiet for a moment, then set the forehead protector on her lap and made a futile effort to smooth out the wrinkles. "I missed most of what happened at the end, because of that. I didn't really get myself together until I heard her tell Shizune to . . . open his jacket so she could get a clean strike, and then. . . ."

Sakura pursed her lips before she finished, and then put the forehead protector back on.

"She told me if I start aging five years for every one, it's my own damn fault," she said neutrally, tying the knot. "And then she said she'll teach me the jutsu she uses to look younger, so I guess there's no way to fix it." She was silent for a moment, and then let out her breath and rubbed at the dark bags under her eyes.

". . . I'm sorry," he said quietly.

Sakura looked over at him. She didn't say anything for a full minute, but finally asked: "Did you try to get to him? When it first. . . ."

"Yes," Sasuke said.

Sakura nodded.

She sat back in the chair, fidgeting with her fingers. "I thought so. Not . . . most people, they don't believe it, but. . . ." She let out a breath. "I knew, if he wanted the Amaterasu even half as much as you wanted to kill him, he wasn't going to let you go."

She pressed her palms flat against her pants. "Lee . . . he believes that I believe it, but I didn't tell him why."

She looked over at him with that, and her voice lifted at the end of the statement. Sasuke correctly interpreted it as asking if she could tell, and shook his head once. Sakura made a small shrugging gesture, and looked back down.

"I told Kakashi-sensei, too, but I don't know what he thinks. He didn't say anything the whole night after he brought you in."

Sasuke started. "He's the one--?"

She nodded.

_Then_. . . . Sasuke lifted a hand, reaching back to the still slightly sore patches where the wings had breached his skin. _Did he see_. . .

He forced himself to drop his hand. _It doesn't matter. Even if he . . . I never have to use it again. It doesn't matter_.

Very little mattered, now that he had learned Naruto was going to be taken from them, but Sasuke couldn't bring himself to think on that. Thinking on it meant he had accepted it.

". . . Did she disown you as her student?" he asked after another stretch of silence, bringing up the absence of 'sensei' in Sakura's explanations.

He wasn't certain, but it almost looked like she smirked. When she answered, though, her voice was tired. "That was the other stupid thing I did. I told her if she tried to kill Naruto, I'd kill her first."

He had missed a lot, it seemed. "You threatened the _Hokage_."

"Mm." She pointed absently to her shoulder, and Sasuke leaned forward enough to see that there were finger-shaped bruises on her left collarbone and right upper arm. "I probably would have attacked her, too, but I was lucky. Lee held me back."

Sasuke chuckled once, mirthlessly. "All we need now is for Naruto to attack Jiraiya."

Sakura made an attempt at a laugh, but it didn't work out. They fell silent again.

After the silence had stretched out for half a minute, there was a single sharp rap at the door, and Shizune stepped in. Sakura and Sasuke eyed her warily.

"I'm here to run a check up on you, Sasuke-san," she said clinically. "Sakura-kun, if you could bring in the tray outside?"

—

Sasuke tolerated having his temperature taken, the bandages on his arms and face redressed, his blood pressure and vision checked (Shizune recorded his poor eyesight without changing expression, which only made him more suspicious), and a note being made of the stitches in his leg that had popped when he'd run out of the room, while Sakura and Shizune discussed the recovery of the possessed patients with a professional distance.

As Sasuke learned, the reason the onmyouji had failed to arrive at Konoha in time was because he'd had stopped on the way to convince an exorcist to come with him and the escort, there being none in his own village. Tsunade was apparently suspicious of his lingering, but Sasuke told Shizune that the man's actions had been reasonable--more than one person would be needed to exorcise an entire family of fox spirits in any decent amount of time, and a professional exorcist would have more experience than an onmyouji.

Jiraiya had been the first person that had been exorcised, because Tsunade found it unsatisfying to yell at him when he didn't recognize her, and because she felt it right for him to know the situation. The two of them stopped in the room while Shizune was replacing the needle on the IV.

Sakura straightened in her chair when Tsunade entered, but didn't look up. Kyomamushi slithered slightly closer, so that its head was resting against his calf, but did so slowly. Sasuke made a note to ask how wounded it had been when everyone was gone.

Tsunade folded her arms and looked down at him at him with a carefully guarded expression.

"_Why_, exactly, did you decide to go tearing through the halls like that, Uchiha?" she asked.

Sasuke kept his expression equally blank. "Because I wanted to know what happened to Naruto."

"He died," she said shortly.

"Sakura-kun already told him," Shizune replied, finishing with the needle and shifting Sasuke's hand so that she could insert it.

Tsunade made an annoyed but not entirely surprised noise in the back of her throat, and didn't look away from Sasuke. "Maybe if you'd shown that kind of determination during the battle. . . ."

Sasuke focused on keeping his hand relaxed and loose while Shizune inserted the needle, and didn't reply. He saw Sakura make a small, angry motion with her foot, but she kept silent. Shizune tsked under her breath, but it was quiet and easily lost under the noise from the corridor.

"How's your arm, Jiraiya-kun?" Kyomamushi asked, tail lashing once. "I never did get to see if we damaged all the nerves before he chose to leave."

Neither of the man's arms were bandaged, and the viper hadn't opened its eyes once since they'd come into the room; and the wording Kyomamushi used for 'he' left Sasuke with no doubt that it was referring to Orochimaru. Jiraiya's eyes narrowed.

"Please don't taunt the legendary sannin, Kyomamushi-sama," Sasuke said, resting his free hand on its head.

"I'll speak to you later," Tsunade said to Sasuke, cutting off anything Jiraiya was about to say. "Now that you're conscious, you'll be moved to a communal room--we need this space. Sakura, please return to your work."

"Yes," she replied, standing up. She followed the two of them out.

Shizune finished taping the gauze swatch over the needle, and set everything back on the tray. She made a final note on her clipboard, set it on there as well, and then looked at him. "What's the Amaterasu that Sakura-kun mentioned?"

Sasuke blinked at her once, slowly and insolently.

She waited for a few moments, and then told him: "You're only hurting yourself by doing this. If there's a reason that you were distracted. . . ."

"Jiraiya-sama came up to Naruto and I early into the fighting," Sasuke said. "He told us the Hokage had given orders for us to keep separate, so we wouldn't destroy the place if one of us got possessed."

"I see . . ." Shizune said quietly. She paused, then asked, "What does that have to do with Amaterasu?"

"Nothing," he replied.

Shizune watched him for half a minute, and finally shook her head and left.

—

Sasuke tried to sign himself out of the hospital that evening, after his stitches had been replaced. Tsunade listened to Shizune's description of everything she had heard (she'd walked up to the door in the middle of Sakura explaining what had happened to Naruto), reviewed the record the younger woman had made, and upon verifying that Sasuke was as stable as could be expected--barring his eyesight--said there was no reason to keep him in the hospital.

She also said that he would be better off in his own apartment than in a room with other bitter and injured people, but that was only to Shizune, who wouldn't repeat it.

—

Sakura showed up at his apartment late in the evening, and found Sasuke cleaning up a glass he'd broken by setting it too close to the edge of the counter. He hadn't been able to move his arm fast enough to catch it.

"Can you come with me?" she asked, as she set a piece on the table. "To see Naruto?"

Sasuke frowned. "Where are they keeping him? The basement of the jail?"

She shook her head. "In that room, in the tower, since it's an easily guardable location."

"What?" Sasuke replied disbelievingly. "Somewhere so populated? What if someone overhears him?" His eyes narrowed. "Or are they keeping him gagged?"

"Ah," Sakura murmured, "I forgot to--he's unconscious. He's been like that since the battle."

Sasuke dropped the last piece on the table and turned to leave. She closed the door behind them and had to remind him to lock it.

—

The hallway only opened in one place, and it was impossible to enter it without passing by a desk where Yuugao sat, adding names for the memorial marker whenever a new report came in from the hospital. She refused to let Sakura and Sasuke enter until she had radioed Tsunade and gotten her permission to do so. Tsunade also told her to stand beside the door while the two of them were in there.

Sasuke had stopped short when he first saw the room, but Sakura pushed him further in and shut the door behind them. Sasuke made his way slowly over to the cot lying on the ground and wondered _Where did they get the cage?_

"The onmyouji put those ofudas up," Sakura explained, indicating the slips of paper pasted all along the bars of the short cage that surrounded the cot. "They're supposed to be a barrier or something . . . can you get in it? And look at his seal?"

Sasuke nodded, and examined the ofuda. After several moments he settled on his knees and burned away two near the bottom; but he hesitated at putting his hand through the cage. Sakura stepped away and found something distracting at the counter in the corner, turning her back to him.

Sasuke slipped his hand through the bars and carefully touched the heavy scars on Naruto's cheek.

The other teenager's eyes were closed, as was his mouth, so the scars and his nails were the only signs that something had gone wrong again. Someone had taken his jacket, and his boots; there was a cord that disappeared beneath his t-shirt, and Sasuke wondered when Naruto had started wearing a necklace only to remember a moment later that long, long ago, when they'd been traveling back to Konoha and Sasuke hadn't realized what a _spectacularly_ bad idea it was, Naruto had shown it to him.

He pulled his hand away from the scars, and tugged up the hem of Naruto's shirt to examine the seal. He had to press his face against the bars, and even then, he couldn't get close enough to see well.

Sakura turned around again when he let out his breath sharply. "What is it?"

He motioned towards the seal, and she moved to sit down across from him.

"They took off mine," he said, "but that was obvious. And the Fourth's does look frayed, but only at the end. . . . What were they trying to _do?_" he muttered, mostly to himself.

"Then, what are these?" Sakura asked, indicating four markings that were placed in a square around the other seal.

"Backups," Sasuke answered. "Like . . . nets. They must have. . . ."

He trailed off, and shifted closer to the bars to study the markings. When he started frowning, Sakura prompted: "Must have?"

"Fox spirits have an excess of yin energy," Sasuke explained. "So they're always lacking in yang energy and trying to acquire it. That seal I did was a yang-based one, so I balanced it by using a yin essence like blood. But here--" he indicated the seal again "--it looks like they used a yang-based releasing seal with a yang essence."

She started to bite her lip, then stopped and asked, "Like what?"

"Semen, probably," Sasuke said, eying the area.

". . . Ew," Sakura muttered half-heartedly.

"They would have put this seal here to keep it from taking over immediately, but they . . . must not have made it strong enough. . . ." He shook his head, frown deepening. "We only got away with what we did because Naruto was holding it back; if he gave it free license to kill them, all they did was force-feed it enough yang to rip their throats out. But I don't . . . why were they even tampering with it in the first place, right in the middle of an attack?"

"How bad is it?"

Sasuke considered the seals for several more moments, and finally pulled his hand out and sat back. "It's not impossible. It's only barely frayed, and a stronger seal can counter for that. I don't know how much it's affected his chakra, though."

She shook her head. "That's okay. I'm going to try to get Hinata in here, to see what it's like."

He looked over at her. "Do you think they'll let us try to fix it?"

"No," Sakura said. "But . . . I don't know, if. . . ."

Her voice grew fainter and trailed off; and after a little bit, she reached in hesitantly, and smoothed Naruto's shirt back over his stomach. "If it's not worse than before . . . if we can buy some time. . . ."

_She_ didn't even sound as if she really believed it, so Sasuke saw no reason to say anything. They both watched Naruto in silence.

—

When they left the room several minutes later, Tsunade and Jiraiya were waiting for them in the hallway.

"Have you both said goodbye, now?" she asked them, and they looked at her. After a couple seconds of silence, Tsunade nodded once and began to step forward. "Then. . . ."

Sakura jolted, and stared, eyes wide. "You're not--_now?_ You **can't**!"

Tsunade gave her a hard look. "You asked for enough time to say goodbye. Now--"

"You **_can't_**" Sakura made a frantic motion, shoving herself in front of the doorway. "You can't just--just _kill_ him and not even tell him _why!_"

Tsunade let out a breath, but when she spoke again, her voice was almost gentle. "Do you really think it will be kinder to wait until he's woken up only to tell him he has to die?" she asked Sakura. "I'm not going to allow you to keep endangering your life and the lives of others in an attempt to prevent the inevitable. Don't get caught up in thoughts of false hope."

Sakura clenched her fists, and then--startling all three of them, as well as Yuugao, who was watching the scene with two shuriken concealed in her hand--bowled deeply from the waist.

"_Please_," she whispered. "It's not _right!_ Tsunade-sama, **please**!"

Tsunade didn't say anything for a moment. Sasuke looked away from Sakura, and then bowed himself--not as deeply, but that might have been because his back was still aching.

"Please," he said as well. "I need to apologize. I should have stayed with him."

Jiraiya's eyes narrowed slightly at that, and he folded his arms. "It won't be any easier if you keep delaying this," he told them. "You should accept that he's gone and begin moving on."

"It's not _right_," Sakura repeated quietly.

Jiraiya sighed and leaned against the wall. "**Kids**--"

"Fine," Tsunade said.

Sakura and Sasuke looked at her.

She held up a hand to cut Jiraiya off before he could begin. "But only until he wakes up. You can see him one last time, and then he dies." She gave them both a hard look, willing them to understand. "There's no place for him here anymore."

Sakura swallowed, and then nodded and bowed again. Sasuke did the same. "Thank you," she said. "It--thank you."

"Now go home," Tsunade replied. "You're on call tomorrow morning."

Before they passed the desk again, Yuugao dropped her eyes and acted as though she'd been absorbed in paperwork the whole time. Sasuke was almost grateful for the small courtesy.

—

By the time they got outside, Sakura was swearing violently and desperately under her breath. Sasuke slid his hands into his pockets, hunching in against the sharp, cold wind.

Sakura ran out of steam when they were a few blocks from the hospital, and finally just let out a strangled, pained cry and fell silent. Sasuke's leg ached from the stitches and the deep bruise that covered almost the whole of his left calf, but he walked home with her.

He wound up sleeping on their couch. Sakura ordered him to stay over because he'd left the hospital too soon for his own good and he would be better off here than alone in case something happened; but later that night, she told Lee that if anyone tried to use this time to finally arrest him for treason, it was damn well going to happen where she would know about it.

"She's not taking both of them," she said harshly, throwing back the covers, and Lee rubbed his palm against the nape of her neck and murmured whatever comforting words he could think of.

——

Jiraiya managed to convey through extremely displeased silence that he wanted to speak to her further, so Tsunade--instead of going home and going to bed like she wanted to--waved a hand over her shoulder and led him up to her office.

"You shouldn't have done that," he said, as soon as he'd closed the door behind him. "You _know_ they're going to plan to something."

"Of course they will," Tsunade replied, collapsing into her chair. Jiraiya dragged another seat up to the desk and sat on the edge of it. "But there's no way they'll be able to pull off a coordinated stunt like that again. Besides, the Hyuuga girl is useless now."

When Jiraiya only continued to glare at her, Tsunade snarled and slammed a palm on the desk, making it creak. "What was I _supposed_ to do, after that! Say 'too bad' and walk in there and kill him?"

"Send them **home**," he replied. "They don't need to see it."

"They wouldn't have gone."

"I could have taken them!" Jiraiya replied. "Or you could have, and I would have done it! But you handled it badly, agreeing to give them more time to suffer over--"

"If I kill Naruto without letting them say goodbye, those children are never going to forget it," Tsunade snapped. "Twelve--**twelve**--reports I got on Uchiha's reaction within **one** hour, Jiraiya! And _she_ seriously intended to attack me!"

Tsunade faltered slightly with that, remembering the look on Sakura's face when she'd been trying to break out of Lee's grip and throw herself in front of Naruto. A small trickle of blood had been running down her forehead where the ruined diamond had formed.

Lee had managed to keep her on her knees, and had finally been able to talk her down to a slightly calmer state, despite the fact that Shizune had been standing in front of Tsunade for almost the whole time, darts aimed.

Tsunade hadn't missed that even as he kept his arms wrapped around Sakura, he angled them so he was protecting her heart and throat.

She shook her head. "They're still young enough to form lifelong grudges. I already can't send my second best medicnin on any mission outside of Fire--do you want me to have to restrict her solely to the hospital and let her become a chuunin in name only?" Tsunade made a violent gesture, cutting Jiraiya off when he started to argue more. "And I'll never be able to trust the Uchiha with anything above a D-rank mission within the village walls, and that's a waste of talent that Konoha can't _afford_. There _is_ no good way to handle this!"

She glared at him, but it was tired. "It's better to let them suffer through their own doing than to try and make it easier on them." She snorted once, mirthlessly. "We've seen how well they take that, anyway."

"Coddling them isn't going to make it easier in the end," Jiraiya said darkly. "And what if it's not Naruto in--"

"I **know**!" she said sharply. "Damn it, Jiraiya, give me _some_ credit for having planned for that!"

She glared at him for almost half a minute, until he finally raised his hands and muttered, "Sorry. I didn't mean it as. . . ."

Tsunade snorted again. Then she kicked away from her desk, and started rummaging through a bottom drawer. She didn't speak again until she'd brought up a cup and a bottle of plum wine.

"What do you think would have happened if it had been you that left, instead of Orochimaru?" she asked as she poured.

Jiraiya raised an eyebrow. "You would have thrown a party?"

She gave him a look over the rim of the cup, and he let the frivolousness seep out of his expression. "It doesn't matter," he replied, sitting back. "This isn't the same situation."

"I know," Tsunade said quietly. "That's what makes it worse. He means more to them than you did to us."

She drained the cup in silence.

"Where'd you bury the bastard?" she asked abruptly, setting it down.

"Beside Sarutobi-sensei's grave," he replied. "Stand at the left back corner and take two steps diagonally." Then, when she started to pour another cup of wine, he added, "Where's mine?"

Tsunade filled it to the brim, set it in front of him, and then took a swig out of the bottle.

Jiraiya shook his head as he picked the cup up carefully. "So decorous, Tsunade-hime," he said with an empty smile.

"Oh, shut up," she muttered.

——

Sasuke spent the next couple nights sleeping on their couch as well. He was gone before either of them woke in the morning, however, and he made dinner and packed breakfast bentos both nights as a kind of payback.

The meals were interesting, because Sasuke usually misread an amount or a label because he had quickly grown sick of squinting and holding things immediately in front of him. He and Lee once tried throwing in some additional spices to balance things out, and after that they decided the only solution was to brew the tea extra strong and take a gulp after every bite.

Sakura didn't notice the mess being made in the kitchen until the second day--she was too tired from working long hours at the hospital to manage to eat much, let alone taste it. She worked the day shift, so by the time she got back, Lee and Sasuke were already returned from the area that they had been assigned to help rebuild.

(Konoha was once again taking on a ridiculous amount of jobs to prove to other countries they were still strong--most of the reconstruction was being done by genin and low level chuunin.

Neither Lee nor Kakashi remarked on the fact that they were quietly being passed over for assignments at the moment, though in Kakashi's case he had a handful of still-healing ribs.)

"Oi, Sasuke," she called, toeing off her boots, "are your eyes getting _any_ better?"

"A little," he replied. "Why?"

"That rice ball in my breakfast had bits of pickle in it."

She collapsed on the couch as he swore under his breath. "I'll look at them later. I think things are going to start slowing down soon--pretty much everyone in critical condition's stabilized or died."

"Is that why the memorial service is tomorrow?" Lee asked, looking up from his stretches.

"It is?" Sakura asked. She started to sit up again. "Do we have anything black washed?"

"I'll do it," Lee replied, leaning over and pushing her arm gently. "Try to get some rest before dinner."

Sakura didn't argue and flopped back down on the couch. Lee went to do the laundry after finishing his last set of stretches, and Sasuke managed to make a fairly good curry, though it burned slightly when Lee called him into the other room to see if he could fit into an old jacket of his.

(Lee was almost glad that Sakura spent most of her time home sleeping--when she was awake, she and Sasuke were picking fights more and more often over smaller things. They usually dropped it a few minutes later and acted as if nothing had happened; but they never apologized. Lee couldn't help thinking in the back of his mind that he was watching the beginnings of a team falling apart.)

—

Sasuke disappeared for a good portion of the night after dinner, and when he came back his clothes were soaked and muddy, and his hands were chapped red from the cold. He wouldn't tell Lee where he'd been.

——

It was threatening snow on the morning of the memorial service. Sasuke met up with Sakura in the street outside her apartment and walked there with her, while Lee went to meet with Neji, Tenten, and Kakashi.

(The three of them had cornered Kakashi and convinced him to help them talk to Gai, who was too ashamed at having attacked his students to talk to them, despite them doing everything short of breaking into his apartment to see him. Kakashi had agreed to drag the other man off after the service for drinks, but told the group they had better have a plan to corner him there, because his ribs wouldn't allow him to chase him down.)

Sasuke used a henge to hide his eyes, but they stood at the back anyway.

Less than a minute had passed when the faintest scent of cloves reached his nose and made him tense, and then he heard Anko say: "I'd heard a rumor you were killed."

"Wishful thinking," Sasuke replied, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. Her right arm was bandaged from shoulder to wrist and there was a still healing slash along her throat. "I heard nothing about you."

"Like I'd let myself get killed," Anko snorted, but her tone was uncharacteristically subdued, and she was looking ahead, at the memorial slab.

"I didn't assume you would," Sasuke replied, shifting his gaze back to the front. "Not considering who your teacher was."

Anko slapped the nape of his neck with the back of her good hand and moved into the crowd. Sasuke resisted the urge to rub his skin--both to ease the sting and to remove the deliberately familiar gesture.

Sakura made a amused noise in the back of her throat, but didn't comment. Lee and his team, and Hinata and Shino, found their way to them not long after Anko left.

Sasuke had learned that Lee had been more badly damaged in the fighting than he appeared, but one of the advantages of being engaged to a medicnin was priority treatment--now, he only looked more wrapped in bandages than usual. Tenten had also been one of the first people Sakura treated away from her duties; the burns she'd suffered when Gai had deflected one of the explosive weapons she'd thrown at an Akatsuki member were healed over to fresh scars and shiny pink skin. Enough of her hair had been burned, though, that she'd just cut it until it was even shorter than Lee's. Lee had raved over the new style; Neji had pointed out a singed spot she'd missed behind her right ear, which she'd sliced off with a shuriken as they walked.

Neji, of course, had been treated by one of the Hyuuga family's medicnins. His right leg was broken, as was his left wrist, and both of his arms and his torso were heavily bandaged after a surgery to treat the damage that had been done to his chakra system, so that he was currently using a crutch. His hands were perfectly fine, though; Hiashi had left them untouched, and had consequently been killed for it. The Hyuuga clan was in as close to a panic as it ever came, with instating Hanabi as the new head and deciding what kind of punishment Neji should receive, or if he even should receive any--he _had_ been possessed when he murdered the former head, and he _was_ that generation's genius.

Most of the Hyuuga knew he would a superficial punishment, at the most, since it had been within their own clan and there was no need to pacify a different family head. But until the official decree was made, he was only technically allowed to go to the service because he was escorting Hinata.

Sakura had wanted to treat Hinata's right eye herself, so that it would at least scar over sooner, but the other teenager had politely refused her help. The family medicnins had tried to save it, but it had been too damaged, and the best they could do was bandage it over and stitch up the cut below that ran to her cheekbone. She could still see for roughly a hundred and eighty degrees on her left side, and she could still activate the byakugan on that side to see farther and through objects, but her sight cut off from the bridge of her nose to a little to the right of the back of her head. Hinata compensated for the loss by twisting her head to the left, but doing so for the majority of the day was giving her cricks in her neck.

Sasuke was just able to see that Shino had bandages wrapped around his neck. His clothes covered the rest of his body, and he'd been treated by a medicnin that Sakura wasn't on a casual relationship with, so she didn't know any details, and he didn't seem interested in sharing. Sakura was the only one of them who looked uninjured, barring her black headband. It was assumed that she--like the majority of the other medicnins--had healed herself first to better be able to care for others. She wasn't telling otherwise, and Lee and Sasuke took their cue from her.

It was hard to hear the speeches being made in the back, but they stopped listening anyway once Neji deactivated his byakugan and said: "His name's not on there."

Hinata made a pained noise. Sasuke slid his hands into the pockets of the coat that Lee had loaned him, pulling it a little closer around (it was too tight across the chest for him to be able to button it and still move efficiently). Lee clenched a fist, then opened it when the skin over his knuckles threatened to split again.

"That's not fair!" he said. "This wasn't Naruto-kun's fault!"

"And he led them out of the village," Neji added coldly. "There would be more names on there if he hadn't."

"It's political," Sakura replied, arms folded in front of her and holding her elbows. "There was no way, so soon after . . . it'll be added later. I'm sure it will."

Sasuke snorted. "And then a few nights after that, someone will have chiseled it out."

"There's no reason for people to keep holding those grudges if he's gone," she replied, and Sasuke gave her a disbelieving look.

"Do you think that just because--"

"If you can't pretend to be an optimist for a few hours, then _please_ shut up!"

"Sakura, Sasuke-kun, please!" Lee whispered.

They fell into a stony silence and looked back to the front.

But a few moments later, she said, "Stop thinking the worst." Before Sasuke could say anything, she added: "There were others, like Gaara and Naruto."

All six teenagers looked at her. A few of the adults in front of them stiffened.

"We found out that Akatsuki was after all of them," Sakura continued, staring over the other people to the where the memorial stone stood. "When they came to the other villages, some of them just handed their bijuu over."

She gave Sasuke a look. He was quiet for a few moments, and then shook his head. "They attacked us head-on here. . . ."

"If we'd just distracted ourselves with quarantining the possessed people, and paid no attention to their taking him, no one might have died," Sakura retorted. "Maybe they didn't like him, but they still fought. That's _something_."

When another silence began to stretch out, it was Tenten who broke it.

"Of course we fought," she said. "We're shinobi of the Leaf. It's what we do."

None of them spoke for the rest of the service.

—

When it was over, Kakashi led Gai off, and Lee, Neji and Tenten followed soon after. Hinata began to head back to the Hyuuga complex, but Sakura caught her by the right elbow, and then quickly apologized for startling her.

(Hinata would, months later, confide to Sakura that she didn't know how other people could be brave enough to live day in and day out with such a large blind spot.)

"Ah, Hinata-chan, could you . . . can you come with me? There's something I need you to see."

Sakura looked over her shoulder at Sasuke, who shook his head once.

"Not again," he said.

"Okay," she replied. "I'll see you." She began leading Hinata off. "It's at the tower . . . let's take the rooftops, I have to explain something first. . . ."

"Sakura-chan?" the other teenager said, having noticed that Sakura was leading them away from Kiba, who was making his way over.

"Out of the crowd, c'mon Hinata-chan, please. . . ."

Shino watched them go with a crease in his brow, but shrugged off Kiba's question when the other teenager reached him. Sasuke had disappeared before they were onto a side street, while he could still pretend that he hadn't seen Shizune try to flag him down.

Of the three Akatsuki bodies that had been recovered and set aside to be dissected and cremated after the rites for the Leaf shinobi were given, one had gone missing, you see.

——

It was impossible for him to avoid being questioned for long; the next day, a note came just before lunch that Sasuke needed to come to the hospital for a second checkup on his eyes. Shizune included at the bottom that he should leave immediately--he could eat lunch with her, and do the checkup afterward. He abandoned the section of the wall that he'd been laying and, after wiping the mortar off his trowel, left. Lee was working up on the roof of the building across the street, so Sasuke didn't ask if there was any message the other teenager wanted him to relay to Sakura.

He was not surprised to find, upon entering the hospital cafeteria, that Shizune was sitting at a table with Tsunade. Sakura was also there, but she looked surprised to see him.

Kakashi was sitting at another table two meters away, seemingly absorbed in a battered copy of Icha Icha Violence. Sasuke didn't look at him as he made his way to the table.

"I buried it within the Uchiha complex," he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. "I trust it was in my familial rights to do that."

Shizune choked slightly at his bluntness, and took a sip of water. Sakura had stopped eating.

Tsunade retained an expression of utter composure. "You stole a corpse out of the crematorium," she replied. "I'll overlook that, since its nothing compared to the rest of what you've done, but Uchiha Itachi was much too powerful to be allowed to go uncremated."

"I already did that," Sasuke replied. He hadn't cared to let the secrets of the mangekyou sharingan get out, either. "I didn't see a reason to trouble the already overworked crematory assistants."

Tsunade gave him a hard look. "It's going to be in your best interest to start selling off some of that land soon," she said. "I don't think the people who'll buy it will be pleased to unearth an urn when they're trying to put in a garden."

"It won't be found," he replied.

"He's _dead_," Sakura interjected tiredly, having pieced things together. "You can quit now."

Sasuke looked at her coldly. "Maybe **you** believed that 'an enemy should be treated with respect once they're dead' bullshit, but **I** considered the source."

Sakura shifted away slightly, but after a couple seconds she caught hold of herself, and made her face blank.

"You should respect your older brother, Sasuke," she said, turning back to her meal and picking up her chopsticks. "After all, you wouldn't be who you are without him."

"Sakura-kun!" Shizune hissed, and Sakura took a bite of rice.

Sasuke was silent for several long moments. Then he stood up, said curtly, "My eyes are fine," and slammed his seat back beneath the table.

It missed hitting Sakura in the elbow by a centimeter. She gave no indication of noticing.

Tsunade watched Sasuke stride out of the cafeteria, jerking sharply to avoid accidentally touching anyone. Then she glanced over at Kakashi. He tucked the novel back in his vest, took a last bite of food, and followed, throwing away his tray as he left.

"That was uncalled for!" Shizune snapped. "Regardless of how--"

"It was the truth," Sakura interrupted. "It won't kill him to hear it." She set her chopsticks down and started to stand. "I'm going back to work."

Tsunade caught her by the elbow before she could get all the way up and pulled her back into her chair.

"You're going to finish your lunch," she replied. "One dramatic exit is enough. And you're no use to anyone if you pass out from a lack of food."

Sakura simply sat there, tense, for a moment; but she finally picked up her chopsticks and began eating. It was harder this time, since her hands were shaking faintly.

Tsunade didn't say anything else for a while, and gestured for Shizune to remain quiet as well. When Sakura had finished over half her beef bowl, however, Tsunade drank the last of her water and set the cup on the table before saying, "You two are going to gain nothing, acting like this."

"Yes," Sakura muttered.

"Sakura," Tsunade said evenly. "I have lived through two wars, several dead loved ones, and losing my own teammate to betrayal. I'm not going to be guilt-tripped over one boy. You two will learn to get along without him."

"He's not just one--!" Her hand clenched around the chopsticks. "Don't you _understand_, you're killing everyone who ever believed in him!"

"Your generation is strong," Tsunade replied. "They'll survive."

The chopsticks began to splinter. Sakura set them heavily on the table.

". . . Please excuse me, Tsunade-sama," she said a moment later, staring down. "I'm not hungry."

Tsunade gave her a long look.

". . . Of course," she answered. "I made a mistake in giving you such long hours--you're obviously too young to handle so much chakra exertion. Take the next three days off, and then return here."

Sakura's eyes widened, but she replied, "Thank you, Tsunade-sama," and pushed away from the table.

When she was out of hearing, Shizune murmured, "Tsunade-sama, do you think that was a wise--?"

"She's been drugging Naruto when we go in there to check on him," Tsunade replied quietly, making Shizune start, "to keep him unconscious longer. This needs to be finished."

Shizune closed her eyes and let out her breath. She pressed a hand to her temple, tiredly, before opening them again and turning back to her food.

—

Sakura was nearly at the bathrooms at the end of the corridor, rubbing the heel of her hand angrily against one of her eyes, when Sasuke walked out of the men's. He was drying his face with a paper towel. They paused when they saw each other.

Sasuke looked her over once, and then held out the damp towel. Sakura took it and swiped it across her eyes, hard.

When he started to move away, she turned slightly and said, "Come have dinner with us?"

Sasuke slid his hands in his pockets. ". . . I'll be late."

"Okay," she replied. They walked past each other.

Kakashi waited until Sakura was in the bathroom before sliding around the corner of the other hallway that he'd been lounging in.

——

Sasuke had become remarkably adept at disappearing over the years--Kakashi lost him by the time they were out of the hospital.

But one of the traits of a good hunter was not only the ability to track, but also the instinct for where the prey would go. Kakashi didn't bother trying to pick up Sasuke's scent, and instead made his way toward the Uchiha compound.

The teenager had already reached it when he got there--he must have teleported at some point. There was a kunai lodged in the ground in front of the main gate.

Kakashi eyed it for a moment, and then scooped up a rock and threw it at the gate. It bounced back a moment later, scorched, while the barrier flickered into view. Kakashi sighed in annoyance and went to examine the setup.

The barrier didn't contain all of the compound, but instead a rectangular swath to the center and left of the main entrance. At the corner closest to him, Kakashi found another kunai in the ground, with blood smeared on the blade.

The barrier had been hastily and a little sloppily thrown up, but Sasuke had used blood, which was one of the strongest components to any jutsu that there was. It would take a hefty amount of effort for Kakashi to break it on his own.

He considered for a few minutes, and then left it alone. Instead, he jumped to a nearby rooftop that was high enough to let him to see a good distance into the compound, settled into a crevice that kept some of the wind at bay, and waited.

—

Nearly half an hour passed before Sasuke came into view, up the road that went past the Uchiha household and led to the Nakano river. He was carrying something wrapped in a lot of wet and mud-stained cloth.

_Very good_, Kakashi thought to himself, eyes flicking once more to the barrier and then back to Sasuke. By the time he'd gotten off the roof, jarring his ribs slightly with the last jump, Sasuke had broken the barrier and was wiping the kunai off on one of the few non-muddy places on his pants.

His boots were still fairly clean, which made Kakashi suspect that Sasuke had taken them off before wading in the river. He hated to think of what that had done to the teenager's feet.

He wondered how Sasuke had known that that was where Shisui was found.

When he got closer, Kakashi also noticed that there was something hanging around his neck, beneath his shirt. He would study the outline several times during the walk back when Sasuke wasn't looking, but the shirt wasn't damp enough for him to be able to make out the shape.

Sasuke shoved the package at him wordlessly, then folded his arms and hunched over. He was shivering badly in the winter wind, and didn't move out of that position except to pick up the other kunais.

"What about the last two?" Kakashi asked, as they headed back toward the more occupied parts of the village.

"I'll get them later," Sasuke replied.

After they'd passed down three more streets, each growing more populated, Kakashi said: "You know, my teacher once told my teammate and I that redemption isn't about dying."

". . . Hn," Sasuke replied neutrally.

"He said that the day before he was killed sealing the fox demon into Naruto," Kakashi continued. He shifted the package over to his other side, and then regretted the motion as soon as the wind hit the damp places that had been left behind. "I guess he wanted at least us to understand why he was doing it. Rin figured it out sooner than I did, though," he added with a faint grin.

Sasuke frowned. When Kakashi didn't go on, he repeated, "'Understand why'?"

"Well," Kakashi said, "technically, that's still forbidden to talk about." He looked over at Sasuke and might have smiled, though it was hard to see through the mask at that angle. "I'll explain it to you guys when the statue of limitations runs out."

Sasuke looked back down the road, tucking his hands further beneath his armpits. "Do whatever," he replied. "I don't care."

Kakashi could tell that this time he meant it.

—

After Sasuke had turned down a street, leaving him behind, Kakashi shifted the cloth around until he could see inside. He found a small, round tea caddy, tied shut with two lengths of rope.

_Must have raided the storage area_, Kakashi concluded. _I guess they don't usually have funerary urns lying around in those_.

—

Shizune gave the tea caddy a long look when Kakashi turned it over to her, but didn't comment.

Instead, she asked, "Kakashi-san, have you heard of something called Amaterasu?" When he frowned slightly, she added, "It would probably be related to the sharingan."

He was silent for almost two minutes.

"Hm," he finally said. "I haven't, but if I had to guess, I would say it's a level of the mangekyou. Sasuke once told me that the roughest version of it is called the 'Susano,' and the Tsukiyomi is a version of it that both Itachi and Sasuke have mentioned. So. . . ."

"Amaterasu must be the highest," Shizune finished. "Do you know anything else about them?"

"Unfortunately, no," Kakashi replied. "The Uchiha clan only told me as much as they felt was appropriate for me to know, and Sasuke inherited their restraint."

"Mm," Shizune replied, giving the tea caddy another look and guessing that Sasuke wouldn't have left even a bone fragment large enough to eke out a clue. "Well, thank you for your help."

——

Sasuke returned to the apartment to find Sakura slumped at the table in the living room, a cup and an open sake bottle beside her. She was toying half-heartedly with the cards that had been left out from last night. She wasn't wearing her forehead protector.

"How many of those have you had?" Sasuke asked, kicking off his boots.

She glared at him. "Just o--what the hell happened to you! Sasuke! You weren't walking _outside_ like that, were you?"

"I'm taking a shower," he replied, moving past her.

"You idiot . . . borrow some of Lee's clothes when you get out. Sasuke, what did you _do_ to him?"

"I left him where he belonged." The bathroom door closed, cutting off further conversation.

—

When he came out half an hour later, skin no longer blue-tinged, the sake was still open. Sakura's face didn't look more flushed, though, and Sasuke didn't get a chance to comment on it anyway, because as soon as he sat down she began to explain everything.

"It's hopeless," she said quietly, resting her head on the table and pushing her hair up out of her face. "I gave him enough to keep him asleep for another day or two, but after that. . . ."

Sasuke reached out and gathered up the cards. "Fine."

Sakura looked over at him. "'Fine'?" she repeated derisively.

"You tried," he replied. At her disgusted look, he added harshly, "What do you **want**? To flee the village with him and hope that when he wakes up, it'll be him in there and not the fox?"

Sakura shoved away from the table. "Is running away _always_ your first thought?"

She stalked off to the bedroom and closed the door hard behind her.

Sasuke shuffled the deck for a few minutes, falling into the repetitive motion and concentrating on making it smoother each time. Then he moved his clothes to the dryer and laid out a hand of solitaire.  
-

When Sakura had remained in the bedroom for over twenty minutes, Sasuke borrowed a bottle of metal polish from her and Lee's supply shelf and cleaned the necklace he was wearing.

Even with that, scorch marks remained in some places. A few of the links were soldered together, so it hung awkwardly when he tucked it back beneath his shirt.

—

By the time Lee returned home, Sasuke had changed back to his own clothes and had played enough rounds of solitaire to become extremely frustrated with his eyesight, and his back ached from continually leaning forward to see the numbers and symbols more clearly.

"Sasuke-kun! Why didn't you come back to work?" Lee admonished as he removed his shoes.

"Too wet."

Lee blinked once at that, but before he could ask, he noticed the bottle of sake.

"That's Sakura's," Sasuke replied, correctly interpreting Lee's disapproving silence. "But she didn't have more than two drinks." He explained--slightly more succinctly--what Sakura had told him, as Lee put the bottle away and set the cup beside the sink.

Lee exhaled heavily when Sasuke was finished, and went to check on Sakura.

He came back soon after, not looking any better. "She's asleep."

"She needs it," Sasuke replied. "She's taking everything too hard."

Lee looked at him. "And you aren't?"

Sasuke pushed the cards into a pile and began sorting them to be shuffled again. Lee sat down across from him.

"I know I don't know you that well, Sasuke-kun, but you don't have to act like nothing's changed." Lee folded his arms on the table, gingerly resting them so that he wouldn't put any pressure on the bruise near his elbow. "I'm going to miss him, too."

"I don't care," Sasuke replied.

Lee wondered briefly if this was what Sakura and Naruto dealt with on a daily basis. "He was your _teammate_, Sasuke-kun. I can't believe that you would feel that kind of apathy at the news--"

"It's not apathy," Sasuke interrupted, staring down at the cards. He was still shuffling them. "It's endurance."

Lee furrowed his brow. "'Endurance'? But that's . . . endurance is striving past your limits. Continuing on after you're so exhausted that your eyes feel like they're tied down with lead weights! It's not--"

"Not caring is also endurance," Sasuke replied. "You can survive anything if you don't let it matter."

Lee was silent for a while, and watched Sasuke shuffle the cards.

". . . I guess I can see how that works," he finally acquiesced. "But it still doesn't feel right to me."

For a moment, it looked like the corner of Sasuke's mouth quirked up.

Whether he'd imagined that or not, Lee noticed that when the other teenager spoke again, his face didn't look quite as closed off as it had before.

"It's something I learned in Oto," he replied, and began dealing out the cards for himself and Lee. "It _shouldn't_ feel right."

—

After dinner, Lee said, "There's something I want you two to see."

Sakura and Sasuke gave him vaguely curious looks. Lee stood up. "I heard about it from Tobitake-san while we were working on the roofs."

"What is it?" Sakura asked.

"It's outside!"

"That's where, not what, Lee. . . ."

"Let's go," Sasuke said, standing as well and carrying up his plate over to the sink.

—

Sakura began redoubling her effort to make Lee tell them once he brought them to the path that would lead to the re-placed memorial tablet, but he remained firm in his intention not to give the secret away. Sasuke turned on the flashlight once the trees provided sufficient cover from the village, and said nothing.

"Here!" Lee said once they reached the stone. "I don't know exactly where it is, though . . . Sasuke-kun, could I borrow that?"

Sasuke handed over the flashlight, and Lee crouched and began studying the side of the stone with the most new names chiseled on it.

Sakura glanced over at Sasuke. He shrugged briefly.

"Ah!" Lee called. "It was true!"

"_What_ was true?" Sakura asked exasperatedly, pressing a hand to her forehead.

"I heard that Konohamaru-kun got in trouble for writing Naruto-kun's name on here," Lee replied. He gestured to a bottom left corner of the stone. "See?"

Sasuke and Sakura crowded around him.

The name was a little smeared, as if someone had tried to wipe it away, but the permanent ink was still there. The last character of Naruto's name trailed off abruptly, as if Konohamaru had had to run as soon as it was finished.

". . . oh," Sakura said quietly, a hand to her mouth. "That crazy little brat . . . where did he even _find_ a marker that color. . . ."

Sasuke had knelt next to the stone, but he looked over at her with that. "What color?"

"It's _orange_," she replied, and then frowned. "Can't you tell?"

He turned back to the stone, brushing off her question with a shake of his head. "He's an idiot," he commented, in a voice lacking causticness.

"It's a good testament to Naruto-kun's influence on people," Lee said seriously, and Sasuke almost made an amused noise.

"Passing on the legacy of vandalism," he muttered, sitting back on his heels. "Hn. He'd probably be proud."

They remained there, in the noise of the night, for a while. Eventually, Lee looked up at Sakura, and then squinted to make sure he was reading her expression right.

He reached up and took her hand, causing her to start. "Sakura? Are you--is something wrong?"

"No," she said faintly, still staring at the stone. "I'm fine. Just . . . thinking."

Before Lee could question this, she shook her head once, vehemently. Then she pressed a hand against her forehead again.

"I didn't put on my protector," she said. "Can we . . . is it okay if we head back? Before someone notices?"

"Yeah," Sasuke said, straightening. Lee stood as well, keeping his hand in Sakura's, and as they began the walk back she intertwined their fingers.

—

When they were a few blocks away from the apartment, Sasuke turned down the street that would lead to his own.

"Wait, you're going home?" Sakura asked.

"I'm paying so much for the privilege of living there, I might as well get my money's worth," Sasuke replied.

Sakura frowned. "But--"

"If anyone comes to arrest me in the middle of the night, I'll set the place on fire," he said. "If you don't notice that, too bad."

She shook her head tiredly. "Don't joke about that, Sasuke."

"I'm not," he replied, and turned back down the street.

"Oh . . . whatever," Sakura muttered. "I just want to sleep."

Lee squeezed her hand slightly. "Let's go home."

——

When Lee got up for work tomorrow, Sakura managed a wave and mumbled something that was either a "Good morning," or half of a "Good luck at work." It was hard to tell with her face buried in the pillow to keep out the light.

Half an hour after he left, she was already up and on her way to Ino's parents' shop. She wasn't back until almost after dinner. She didn't talk much after she returned.

Sasuke hadn't come back for dinner either, and it made Lee wonder if they'd gotten into another fight sometime after work had finished for the day.

He was wrong, but he didn't learn that until late that night.

—

At some point past midnight, Lee woke up on his own before Sakura could wake him. She'd been sitting up in the bed for almost a half an hour and still hadn't thought of a good way to begin what she had to say, so she started badly when Lee pushed himself up onto an elbow beside her.

"Sakura?" he asked worriedly, reaching out to touch her arm.

"It's okay if you say no."

He frowned. "What?"

Sakura was hunched over, staring at her knees. "I just . . . it's okay. If you say no. I wanted you to know that first."

Lee sat up, still frowning. "I don't understand."

"I can't let him be killed," she said quietly. "I don't--I know it's in everyone's best interest, but I can't just stand here and let it **happen**!"

"Sakura. . . ." Lee wrapped an arm around her waist and shifted a little closer. "I know it hurts, the thought of losing him, but. . . ."

She was shaking her head. "I can't," she murmured. "I can't just . . . I _can't_."

"What else _is_ there to do?" Lee asked, trying to coax her around to reason.

"Leave," she answered.

His arm tensed.

"It's possible," she said. "I didn't think so before, but . . . if I beg to be the one who kills him, I can make it seem like he died without really doing it. Getting him out was the impossible part, but if there was someone who'd be willing to take a risk to be a distraction . . . it would only need to be a henge, and as long as Konohamaru didn't get caught--and even if he did, with his family, he wouldn't be in as much trouble as other people--"

"You're talking about becoming a missingnin," Lee said quietly.

"I know," she replied.

"How do you even know if it's still _him?_" Lee asked. "Isn't that what Hokage-sama was afraid of?"

"I don't," Sakura replied. "If he isn't, then. . . ." She splayed her hands palms up briefly. "Then none of it matters. But if it's still him there, I can't let him die."

Lee was silent, and Sakura let her hands drop to her sides. "I . . . I tried to give this up," she whispered. "I really did. I helped Ino-chan with repairing her store, and I dragged her with me to shop for wedding kimonos. I went and had lunch with my parents. I visited some of my old teachers, after the academy let out for the day. I tried."

Lee wrapped his other arm around her, and pulled her closer.

"Sakura," he said, very quietly, "he almost killed you."

She shook her head loosely, as if she didn't have the energy even for such a small action as that anymore.

"I know," she replied helplessly. "I couldn't make it matter."

Lee pressed his temple against the side of her throat.

"I'd have been dead years ago without him." She clenched the blankets, twisting them slightly in her grip. "When the Sand and the Sound first attacked, and we were sent after Gaara . . . and then before, with those two from the Mist. . . . We'd both have died long ago, and Kakashi-sensei might have, too."

Sakura let go of the blankets, and made another small, fluttery gesture. ". . . He's my teammate," she whispered, and Lee closed his eyes.

Neji and Tenten had visited him in the hospital, the day before his surgery. None of them had said anything about it, and Neji had spent most of the visit acting as though the whole thing was a waste of his time, because Lee was too annoying to die until he'd finally gone through with that threat of defeating him; but Tenten had lingered after Neji had had to return home.

"Are you sure you should do this?" she'd asked, sitting on the edge of his bed. "Wanting to prove that an honorable ninja only needs taijutsu is a good dream, but. . . ."

"I know it's risky," he'd replied. "But I have another reason."

He hadn't said more, and Tenten hadn't pushed. Instead, she'd shaken her head, sighed dramatically about how he _al_ways had to push too far, and had wished him good luck.

He'd gone through with the surgery, despite all the risks, because he couldn't imagine his life without being a ninja, and he couldn't imagine being a ninja without having Gai, Neji, and Tenten beside him. Death would eventually break them apart, they had all accepted that, but to be left behind. . . .

". . . I understand," Lee said quietly, despite how much he wished he **didn't** understand at that moment. "But, Sakura . . . everything I have here. . . ."

"I know," she murmured. "It's okay if you say no."

She was making a sincere effort to sound as though she meant it. Lee appreciated that.

"I can't . . . say, now . . . I have to think about it," he said.

She nodded, not turning to look at him. "I know. Of course."  
-

Lee stayed awake long after Sakura finally fell asleep.


	21. ripple 21: Sasuke part trois

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

This is the final chapter, since the story of Sasuke's return ends here. Thank you to everyone who's reviewed or left constructive criticism or advice--I've appreciated all of it.  
—————

**-'**

Sakura came to get Sasuke when work finished that evening. Hinata was with her, which made him suspicious; and the suspicion only increased when she had them walk along the streets until they reached a section that wasn't so crowded.

Hinata tried to make small talk as they moved. Sasuke answered her just enough to keep up appearances for anyone who was watching them, but Sakura was distant and distracted when she actually did reply. Finally, while still walking, she wrapped her scarf around her throat and mouth and then spoke.

"I'm leaving Konoha," she said quietly. "I'm taking Naruto with me."

Hinata froze. Sasuke--staring at Sakura--put a hand on her arm and pushed until she stumbled back into a walk. Sakura paused long enough for the other teenager to catch up to her, and then hooked an arm through Hinata's, so that she wouldn't give them away by slowing again.

"If--I need you guys to find a way to get out just long enough for the surgery. Hinata-chan said that it isn't as dangerous as the other time, so you should both be able to make it back within a day. I'll contact you later, and we can work out the details then." She paused, and added, "It'll have to be a while from now, because they'll be watching you two after I go."

Hinata didn't seem to know what to say. Sasuke began buttoning up the coat, and then flipped up the collar so it hid his mouth as well as possible.

"The surgery's not a permanent solution. You'll have to keep doing it over and over again," he said.

"I know," she replied.

"It tried to kill you already," he said. "It hates us."

"I don't care," she replied.

Sasuke paused, and then hunched his shoulders so that his mouth was a little more hidden. "Do you think it's possible?"

Sakura nodded. "I . . . Konohamaru has gotten a lot better with henge than he used to be. I checked. I'm going to ask for permission to be the one who kills Naruto, and if he agrees to be a distraction for me . . . if he makes it look like I took Naruto to the crematorium afterward, that'll buy me an hour to get away."

"'If,'" Sasuke repeated neutrally.

Sakura tucked her chin further into her scarf. "It'll be a hard run," she agreed quietly. "But I can do it. I **have** to be able to do it."

"Why not teleport?" he asked. "It makes more sense than relying heavily on a genin."

"No," she replied, "I'm sure someone will be standing outside. The chakra use will let them know immediately what I did, and the anbu are faster than me." She shook her head. "I need that hour."

Sasuke thought it over, and then nodded once. "When do we leave?"

This time, Sakura froze. Sasuke kicked her in the heel, and Hinata tugged at her arm lightly until she began to move.

"No," she said. "No, Sasuke. No _way_."

"If you leave with him, I'm the first person that they're going to come to for information. I'm not going to stay here just to be thrown in prison."

"But. . . ." Her hands clenched into fists. "I won't give you information. You won't know anything about where I'm going. Just say that I didn't tell you I was leaving, and they won't even be able to accuse you of treason by withholding information."

"They don't need to accuse me of that kind of treason to arrest me," Sasuke reminded her. "Do you think she'll care? If her student betrays her, she'll need to pacify the village somehow, and she doesn't have the personality to do it in whatever way the Third managed."

"That's. . . ." Sakura shook her head in a small but violent gesture. "No. They won't even put you on trial this time, they'll--" she exhaled. "They'll just kill you where you're found. **No**."

"I _hate it here_," Sasuke said, ending five months of effort with a harsh breath. "If you two are gone. . . ."

He hesitated, and then corrected himself. "Three." He looked at her.

Sakura stared at the ground. ". . . I don't know yet."

Sasuke didn't have a reply for that. After they had continued walking in silence for a minute, he clenched his hands into fists in the coat's pockets and began running over the plan.

"What about Kakashi-sensei?" Sakura said, recapturing his attention. "And Anko-san? And . . . and Lee, if he stays?"

"Anko and Lee and Kakashi-sensei are not Naruto and you," he replied.

". . . No," Sakura replied after a moment, slowly, in a tone that told him she was supplying her own other people into that sentence, "no, they're not. . . ."

They had crossed a block of the village and had begun to turn back towards the more populated parts when Hinata tucked her chin beneath her jacket collar.

"When do we leave, Sakura-chan?" she asked softly.

Both Sasuke and Sakura looked at her.

"No." Sakura bit her lip, and then pressed her hand against Hinata's arm. "You can't--Hinata-chan, we're going to become missingnins."

"I understand that," Hinata replied. "But . . . Naruto-kun's surgery . . . you'll need help."

Sakura shook her head. "I do, but that just means you need to sneak out of the village one of these days! You don't have to run away with us. I wouldn't ask that."

Hinata began fidgeting with her fingers, even as she continued speaking. "Like Sasuke-kun said . . . they'll come to me. I was also there the first time; if you both leave with him, won't they assume that you're going to try it again?"

Sakura tried to temper the look she gave Hinata. "But your family will protect you. And if you get questioned, and say we didn't tell you, that would be even more believable! It would make sense for us to want to find somewhere to hide before trying that surgery."

Hinata shook her head. "My family won't . . . can't protect me," she said quietly. "I used all that up the first time. And, Hanabi-sama has just been instated as the clan head. She's still young . . . she doesn't have enough power yet to argue with the Hokage if something is demanded of her."

"She has a point," Sasuke commented. Sakura gave him a sharp look.

"If we leave her behind, they'll watch her constantly, waiting for us to contact," he continued. "It's as good as cutting her out of the process. Can you do it without that?"

"I . . . it'll be hard, but. . . ."

"Do you really want to leave her up to Tsunade's method of questioning?"

"Don't you **dare**," Sakura snarled, jerking around to glare at him and pulling her arm free from Hinata's--but Sasuke could see from the expression in her eyes beneath the anger that his meaning had sunk in.

"Please, Sakura-chan," Hinata said urgently. She rested a hand on the other teenager's arm. "I . . . I don't want . . . I'll be helpful, I promise. . . ."

Sakura pulled her arm away, and pressed her hand over her face. "Hinata-chan, please think about it--you're not obligated or anything. We'll manage ourselves. Do you really want to leave here?"

Hinata had pressed her fingertips together again when Sakura pulled away from her, and now she interlaced them as she stared at the ground. "I . . . I know, but. . . ."

She bit her lip, swallowed, and then said, "Konoha won't be home without Naruto-kun."

Sakura saw, from the corner of her eye, Sasuke start to say something; but then he stopped and remained silent.

She started to reach out to touch Hinata's arm, but changed her mind and instead folded her hands together. "Just . . . think about it, okay? Hinata-chan."

"I will," she replied. "Please, when the plan is decided, keep in contact with me?"

"All right," Sakura said, with a tired nod. Then she slid her hands into her pockets and asked, "Can you make it home yourself? I need to talk to Sasuke about some things."

"Yes," Hinata said, nodding just deep enough to be a small bow, and the inherent politeness in the other girl made Sakura shift a little guiltily. "Thank you, Sakura-chan, Sasuke-kun."

They said their goodbyes and parted at a street corner; and when Hinata was out of hearing distance, Sakura glared at him.

"_Why_ did you do that?" she said angrily. "You shouldn't have encouraged her! We don't need to drag more people into this!"

"Because we can use her," he replied. "Even half the byakugan will see someone coming after us sooner than you or I."

Sakura let out her breath with a hiss that told him his logic only irritated her more.

She dropped it a minute later, though, when they had crossed another street and were beginning to be around more people. When she spoke again, her tone was hushed and weary.

"She won't go," Sakura said. "Her teammates, her teacher . . . Neji and whatever other family members she likes . . . it's just a crush. She won't choose to leave them. Not . . . just for. . . ."

She folded her arms and tucked her hands into the crooks of her elbows, and then changed her mind and slid them back in her pockets.

Sasuke glanced over, reading her expression, and turned back toward the street. "He loves you. You should know that."

Sakura pulled her scarf down, away from her mouth. "If just loving someone was enough to get anything in this world . . ." she murmured. ". . . You would never have left us, would you?"

". . . Probably," Sasuke agreed, as he folded the collar back down and grimaced at the wind. _If it was enough, I never would have had a reason to_.

—

Sakura later asked to spend the night at his apartment. She couldn't go to Ino's or her parents without being asked a lot of questions (and in Ino's case, harassed mercilessly until she gave an answer that sounded like truth), and she didn't want to sleep at her and Lee's apartment.

"It doesn't seem . . . right?" Sakura had said. "To be there when he's . . . I should let him make up his mind without influences."

"Fine," Sasuke had replied.

——

Sasuke had gone over the plan in his head all through the evening, questioning Sakura for more details and developing them where they were lacking. He easily found the major flaw.

They would be traveling with one, possibly two injured people, one of whom still had imperfect sight, and an unconscious body. They would desperately need to put as many kilometers between them and Konoha as possible before the plot was discovered and people sent after them. It also didn't help that the weather continued to intermittedly threaten snow.

In Sasuke's opinion, there was no way to pull it off with just Konohamaru. Even if the boy was good with henge, once he got to the crematorium, he would be found out. They might get a few extra minutes if Naruto had ever taught him the jutsu that allowed clones to be solid, but Sasuke didn't want to bet on uncertain chances. What they needed was someone to cause a big enough distraction that their absence wouldn't be noted until the following morning.

He didn't come to the decision he made easily, despite what anyone would think from his future words and actions.

But the two days' advance that Sakura had managed to drug Naruto was up, and now they were working with an uncertain amount of time until he regained consciousness and had to be put down. Sasuke needed someone who would agree to be the distraction, and he needed to do it with speed.

Sasuke teleported out of the apartment while Sakura was showering, and took only the katana with him.

—

It wasn't really a clearing that he appeared in so much as a wide space between the surrounding trees. He wanted to appear somewhere closer and then walk to the area, to give himself time to think; but he had done something like that once before and it had only ended badly.

Besides, he didn't really need time to think on it. One of the best and worst traits about Sasuke was that when he decided to do something, he would go through with it with all the determination and severity of a self-destructive idiot.

He unstrapped the katana from his back and laid it on the ground, checked that it was firmly locked in the sheath, and stepped back so that it was no longer within reach. Then he removed his right boot, pushed up the leg of his pants and pushed down the sock, gritting his jaw against the cold.

The tattoo was still faintly visible from when he had summoned the snakes previously, before the battle; but even if it hadn't been, Sasuke knew exactly where it was.

He stared at it for a long, silent moment, while the dampness of the ground began soaking through his sock and chilling his foot further.

Then he bit down harshly on his thumb and ran it up the center of the markings, streaking blood across them.

Using the tattoo made the summoning automatic; Sasuke jerked as an extreme amount of chakra was ripped out of him and concentrated on getting his boot back on before the snakes appeared.

—

The wind blew the residual smoke away easily, revealing over twenty snakes, the largest being the width of an old tree trunk and the smallest being Kyomamushi.

Sasuke bent his head. "Thank you for honoring me with your appearance."

"What the fuck do you want, human?" the largest snake asked. "It's freezing."

"I've come to beg a favor from you," Sasuke replied without looking up.

One of the first things Orochimaru had told him after Sasuke signed the contract was to never, ever appear vulnerable before the snakes. Polite, obviously, and mildly subservient, but _never_ vulnerable. The man had said it in a tone that Sasuke rarely heard him use--no undercurrents to it, no innuendo or condescension, but complete seriousness. Sasuke had taken the warning to heart. He was breaking it deliberately.

There was a murmur of low hissings from the snakes. Sasuke didn't shift position, but his head was angled so that he could see none of them had made a motion towards him yet.

The largest snake spoke again. "Who cares?" it said. "Some of our kin are **dead** now because of you."

Sasuke swallowed once, hard. And then he knelt down and touched his forehead to the forest floor, tilting his chin up enough that he could be heard.

"I will sacrifice whatever you want," he replied.

There was another, more prolonged set of hissings, and Sasuke couldn't keep his muscles from tensing. He was painfully aware that his back and neck were open to attack, that he was humiliating himself, that no one person on earth should be worth what he had just offered.

"Even humans?" a different snake asked. It was promptly snapped at by the larger one for speaking, and retreated behind a nearby companion. Sasuke didn't see this, but he heard and interpreted the noises.

"Even humans," he replied. "Please don't request any of those close to . . . anyone from this village."

"Qualifying your offers?" the largest snake mocked. Sasuke couldn't think of a proper response to that, and so remained silent.

There was another conference of hisses in front him. This one went on even longer than the others; Sasuke had to force down the beginnings of panic that someone would arrive from the village before he could state his request. He was taking the fact that they hadn't eaten him yet as a sign he would be able to make it.

"What do you want?" the head snake finally asked. "We _might_ do it, if it's not too much of an annoyance."

Sasuke pushed himself up enough that he was sitting back on his heels, but he continued to keep his back bent and his face down. "I need you to find Ichiro and give him a message from me. I don't know where he is, but I beg you to find him as fast as possible."

The snake made the sharp hissing noise that resembled laughter, but there was still mockery in it. "And what's the message?"

"I'm calling in the favor he owes me," Sasuke replied, focusing intently on the ground and not on his katana, out of reach, or the three snakes that had begun to slither closer to him. "I want him to come here immediately."

There was a very long silence after that. Dampness had soaked into his pants legs from the prolonged bowing; Sasuke first ignored it and then concentrated on it when the silence began to threaten refusal.

"Very well," the snake said, and Sasuke started in surprise but kept himself from reflexively looking up. "We'll do it. You'll be informed of the payment later."

"Yes." Sasuke touched his forehead to the ground again and closed his eyes. "Thank you."

That same mocking laughter of a hiss, and then the sound of the snakes slithering off rapidly in different directions. He didn't move until everything was quiet again, with only the sound of one snake shifting in the dead grass.

Sasuke sat back on the ground, crossing his legs, and focused on simply breathing and not thinking for a few moments. Then he stretched an arm out toward Kyomamushi.

He was surprised to see that his hand was trembling when he did so. It wasn't until the viper draped itself over his shoulder and lap, soaking up what heat he had, that Sasuke realized he was shaking all over.

"You're a fool," Kyomamushi announced neutrally, head resting on Sasuke's collarbone.

"I know," he said quietly.

"Why don't you just cut your eyes out, Sasuke?" it asked. "It'd be faster."

Sasuke touched the skin just above Kyomamushi's still healing wound, and stroked it absently for a while. When the snake hissed once, he finally replied.

"He's my best friend," Sasuke said, and there was an undertone of helplessness in his voice that he never would have allowed in front of a human being.

The snake made a noise very much like a sigh, and slid off his shoulders to pool on his lap and spill over onto the ground. Sasuke bit back a wince as the movement carried it over a few lingering bruises and pulled at the freshly healed scars on his back.

"Fool," it repeated.

"Are you able to do me a favor?" he answered, touching the wounds lightly again.

The viper opened one eye and looked at him.

"Several people heard me imitating Orochimaru's voice when I went back to Oto," Sasuke said. "And I did it again during that mission with the Sand. And no one saw him die but Naruto. There may be rumors."

He shifted slightly, trying to find a comfortable sitting position with several pounds of snake on him. "Will you find Ichiro and give him my message personally? Even if one of the others finds him first. He knows you didn't answer to Orochimaru after I came."

Kyomamushi didn't reply immediately; but soon it undulated once, like a shrug. "Fine."

"Thank you," Sasuke said.

"At least you seem determined to kill yourself quickly, kid," it replied, sliding off his lap. "That's better than being bound to an immortal summoner."

It slithered off to the right, slower than usual but still fast enough for Sasuke to almost hope this would work.

He picked himself up, brushed the dirt from his katana, and began to the walk back to Konoha.

—

Because Sakura hadn't alerted anyone about his disappearance, getting back into Konoha wasn't difficult--he just had to move from place to place between patrols until he was far enough from the walls that he could walk openly.

He didn't want to go back to his own apartment. Sasuke picked the opposite direction, strode down the streets like he had a purpose, and ended up in front of Kakashi's home.

He hesitated on the doorstep. He started to knock, stopped, stood there for a minute, and then realized that the shutters were pulled closed but the slats were partially opened and there was a distant light behind them and Kakashi probably already knew he was there, so he rapped hard twice and then slouched against the frame so that passerby wouldn't be able to see the sword on his back.

The man answered the door sooner than he would have been able to do if he had been asleep, and he was still wearing his normal clothes. He raised an eyebrow faintly at Sasuke, but the teenager stepped into the apartment without speaking and set his sword against the wall beside the door.

"Do you have anything to drink?" he asked, trying to make his voice neutral and having it come out quiet instead.

——

Kakashi only drank for anniversaries, so the alcohol in his apartment consisted of a lone bottle of good sake. He set it on the table with two small cups, and filled them both halfway for Sasuke and himself. He raised an eyebrow again, this time the one hidden by his forehead protector, when Sasuke drained the cup, coughed, and then refilled it to the brim before Kakashi had taken three sips of his own.

When Sasuke finished that one within a minute as well and had started on his third, Kakashi decided he was trying to get drunk as quickly as possible. "How good is your tolerance?" he asked casually, taking another small sip.

"Don't know," Sasuke replied.

"Well, when did you start feeling drunk the last time?" Kakashi asked.

"I was drinking beer then, when Anko had sake, so I didn't have to drink much to get her talking."

"Before that, then."

"Alcohol's a poison to the body," Sasuke replied, taking another swallow. "Wasn't allowed to have it."

". . . Ah," Kakashi said, and took another sip.

He filled his cup halfway again, and let Sasuke refill his a fourth time, and then mimicked sipping it as he carefully questioned Sasuke in an attempt to lead the teenager to giving him an explanation.

Sasuke caught on to what Kakashi was doing when he was about to start complaining about Sakura. He instead began insulting the man, his pitiful dead excuses of teammates, his beloved bastard of a teacher, his intelligence because _any_ idiot would have known that a team composed of a loudmouth braggart and a cold bastard and a girl just smart enough to be dangerous would never turn out well, and then the Fourth one last time for good measure.

Sasuke was slurring badly by that point, so Kakashi forced some toast and water into him and tossed him into bed. He thought that he understood why Sasuke had shown up by then, anyway.

Kakashi and the others should have realized what Sakura and Sasuke were planning, because they were adults and as such they knew it was a fallacy of youth to believe that a bad situation could be healed by moving to a new location. But, in Kakashi's case at least, it was an understandable mistake.

—

Sasuke looked half-dead the next morning, so Kakashi skipped the lecture. The teenager refused breakfast, and while he was yanking the laces of his boots tight, Kakashi asked, "What's the Amaterasu?"

Sasuke's hands tensed. Then he went back to tying the laces. "It's a clan secret."

Kakashi rested his chin on his fist. "I warned you, you no longer have enough political power to keep the Hokage out of those."

Sasuke finished with his boots, and sat silent for a few moments. Then he stood abruptly, staring Kakashi in the face.

Kakashi began to get a bad feeling.

"It's the highest level of the mangekyou," Sasuke replied. "I gained it during the fighting."

He thought that over, and his eyes narrowed slightly. "How?"

Sasuke was still looking him straight in the eyes. "It's gained by killing a blood relation of equal strength."

Kakashi didn't say anything for a while. Sasuke didn't move.

"How long have you known that?" he finally asked.

"Since I was eight," Sasuke replied.

Kakashi just looked at him.

Soon, the man stood up and cleared his dishes off the table. As he dropped them in the sink, he said unemotionally, "You should take some vitamin B when you get back to your apartment."

Sasuke left without replying.

——

As soon as the door was shut behind him, Sasuke shoved his hands deep in his pockets and began walking away as fast as he could without drawing attention.

The wind was very cold; it made his eyes sting.

—

Sakura started to ask where the hell Sasuke had been, and then took a better look at his face and refrained.

"I made breakfast," she said. "I can pack it quickly--you need to be at work soon."

Sasuke grunted, shucking off Lee's coat. "Do you have any vitamin B on you?" he asked.

"Sorry," she said, managing to sound apologetic and not smug.

He grunted again and locked himself in the bathroom.

Sakura was gone by the time he came out. Sasuke ate a few bites of the breakfast, then stowed the rest of it in the small fridge and left again.

——

Sasuke wasn't sure what the protocol was for talking to Lee, and didn't feel able to think hard on it that morning, so--since they were working on different parts of the building, anyway--he said nothing. Lee sought him out during their lunch break.

"Sasuke-ku--" Lee frowned. "Sasuke-kun, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," he said shortly.

"Ah," Lee replied, sitting down near him. "I wanted to ask. . . . Have you spoken to Sakura lately?"

He didn't sound accusatory, just worried. Sasuke looked over. "Yeah. I don't know where she is today, though."

Lee nodded, the motion eventually slowing down until he was still once more.

"She. . . ." He hesitated again. "Is she angry with me?"

Sasuke put down the beef bowl he'd bought, and shook his head carefully. "No. She said she wanted to let you make a decision without feeling like you were being pushed into anything by her being around."

"Ah," Lee repeated, sounding both relieved and slightly more saddened than before. Sasuke looked back down at his food.

—

A few hours later, all the reds and the lines of chakra belonging to the people working on the roofs bled out of Sasuke's vision, leaving him with normal sight again. He spent fifteen minutes staring at the dots of gray nails on the dark wood slats before he thought to release the henge that had become second nature to him.

After that, he found the chuunin in charge of the site and said he was leaving early. He tore across the roofs until he reached his apartment, trying not to look at more than he had to.

—

Sakura was back in the apartment, to his mild annoyance, sewing something at the table. Sasuke only got a brief glimpse of her as he was shutting the door before he sank to the floor, a hand pressed hard against his eyes.

"Sasuke?"

He waved her away. She paid no attention. "What is it?" Sakura demanded, setting down whatever she had at the table. "Geez, what did you _drink?_"

"Nothing," he muttered. "It hurts to see."

Sakura cursed under her breath, and strode across the room. Sasuke waved more violently when she knelt next to him.

"There's nothing wrong!" he snapped. "They're back to normal again."

He could hear the frown in her voice. "Then what. . . ?"

"The colors," he replied.

A moment later, he felt her palm press against his temple, and he jerked his head to the side before the chakra could sink in.

She sighed, but pulled it back. "What were you seeing before, if it wasn't colors? Or . . . have they gotten sharper? I don't remember reading a side effect like--"

"Red," Sasuke interrupted, pulling his hand away. He tried to focus solely on the floorboards, but there were subtle color changes in the wood, as well as the different rings and the darker places where the boards had been laid beside each other. He wound up closing his eyes again. "Just reds."

". . . Okay," Sakura replied.

—

They had to turn the lights off, and leave them like that for half an hour, before she could convince Sasuke to let her examine his eyes.

She determined that he'd lost more cone cells, but he wasn't able to say whether it had affected his perception of color. Sakura decided the only thing she could do was wait until he'd re-adjusted and then ask again.

—

Lee came to the apartment once he got off of work, to determine that Sasuke was okay and to ask Sakura if she would join him for dinner. She agreed, but said she wanted to check Sasuke's eyes one last time.

Lee waited by the outside door while Sasuke and Sakura were in the bathroom. Sasuke sat on the rim of the tub, staring at the floor, trying to ignore Sakura as she pressed her forehead to the small mirror over the sink and focused her breathing until she looked calm and not like she was trying not to cry.

"It's okay," Sakura murmured. Her breath fogged the glass.

She looked over at him, eyes bright. "It's okay, right? If he _were_ going to say yes, then it would . . . we'd feel like we were _obligated_ to love each other after all that, right? So it's better this way."

". . . Yeah," Sasuke said quietly, still staring at the floor.

"Yeah," Sakura repeated, looking down at the sink.

Sasuke stayed in the bathroom until he heard Sakura and Lee close the door behind them.

——

Lee found him early into work the next day--Sasuke was nailing the frames for the second floor of a shop, and Lee climbed up to it with his bare hands rather than taking the extra time to go up the stairs.

"Sasuke-kun! Come have dinner with us tonight!"

Sasuke stared at him for a few moments, wondering if that meant what he thought it did.

"I . . . I will," he finally replied.

Sasuke paused, and then smiled slightly. Lee returned it with a grin. It wasn't a completely happy one, but it wasn't entirely sad, either.

He nodded once, and returned to his work. Lee jogged back over to his section of the construction.

For the next hour, Sasuke kept catching himself wanting to smile, almost as much for his sake as Sakura's.

—

It was a day of good tidings, though not for the group of genin working under Lee, as they had to bear the brunt of his renewed enthusiasm. Half an hour before everyone would have been let off for the day (early, because the snow from last night was starting to fall again), a goldfinch landed on a rafter next to the board Sasuke was nailing in and whistled.

Sasuke returned the call quietly, and then checked the area, hunching his shoulders and tucking his chin as far into his collar as he could without drawing suspicion.

"How soon will they be here?" he asked.

"They're a few kilometers outside the walls," the bird replied, fluffing its feathers up.

Sasuke's fingers tensed around the handle. "That's impossible. Even flying on one of you, they couldn't have gotten into the country that. . . ."

He paused, and then gritted his teeth.

_They were **in** Fire. I didn't have to summon_. . . .

"Fine," he said, cutting his own thoughts off. "Follow me, but stay outside the apartment until--or is it too cold for you?"

"_I_ am not a weakling snake," the goldfinch replied with condescending pride. "A little cold won't kill me."

Sasuke let the comment pass.

He pulled his right sleeve over his hand and then, cradling it to his chest, sought out the chuunin overseeing the store. He explained that he'd broken his pointer finger with the hammer and was leaving to get it set. The man nodded and waved him off.

Sasuke tried to remember if this deep indifference was the same thing that people had given to Naruto, or if it had been something worse for the blond. He wasn't sure--for the first time in a very long while, it was harder to remember past events than immediate ones.

—

When he reached Sakura and Lee's apartment, she was there, boiling leaves over the stove. Sasuke noticed that she was wearing a small mask, and pulled the collar of his shirt up to cover his mouth.

"Where's the masks?" he asked.

"It's okay," she replied. "This is just a test batch. The fumes won't do anything but aggravate your nostrils and make you a little nauseous."

"I thought you went back to work today."

Sakura snorted and stirred the water. "I did. They let me work about an hour, and then one of the doctors suggested I looked like I hadn't had much sleep and would be better off getting more rest."

Sasuke gave her a sideways look. "Your eyes _are_ red."

"Ah." Sakura rested the stirrer on the counter and swiped at them once with her forearm. "That's . . . I sent a slug to Hinata-chan, asking her to get rid of all the plants for poisons in the Hyuuga compound. And then I went and talked to Konohamaru-kun."

The edges of her eyes crinkled slightly, and Sasuke guessed she was smiling. "After I got around to . . . he said he was glad we were going to do this. That way he can rightfully become the sixth Hokage." She chuckled. "Apparently, he has to kick Naruto's butt in a fight before he can do that."

". . . When did they--" Sasuke cut off and shook his head. "Idiots."

"Aren't you back early, too?" Sakura retorted, picking up the stirrer again.

"It's going to snow again," Sasuke replied.

"Ah," she murmured, looking over to the window. "Crap. If it snows the night we have to go. . . . Well, as long as it doesn't stop before we get far enough from the tree."

Sasuke watched her begin to stir the leaves. "Does that require delicate attention?"

Sakura started to reply, paused, and looked over at him. ". . . What did you do?"

"I'll tell you when you're done." He tugged his shirt back down again, and left the kitchen. Sakura muttered something under her breath.

—

When Lee came home about half an hour later (the group of genin having rebelled and refused to stay there any longer), he didn't manage to shut the door before the bird flew inside.

"Ah!" He stretched out a hand, looking a little surprised when it settled on the back of his wrist, and frowned. "Do you think it's--no, it doesn't have a message. . . . Have they started using canaries?"

"It's a goldfinch," Sasuke corrected, from his seat on the couch, sharpening a kunai. "That's its winter plumage."

"Ah," Lee said again. He stroked the bird's back tentatively. It puffed its feathers slightly, but didn't move away, so he continued, absently bringing his arm closer. "I wonder if it got lost. Sakura, do we have any bread?"

"It didn't," Sasuke replied.

Lee looked at him curiously, but by then Sakura had already entered the room. She was giving the bird a hard look.

A moment later, her eyes widened, and she shifted her gaze to Sasuke. "You didn't. . . ."

"Did you really think we'd be able to pull it off with just Konohamaru?" he replied.

"_Sasuke_--"

The goldfinch made a small, impatient stepping motion. "Megumi wished me to remind you that the sooner you give me the information, the sooner they can make a decent shelter and not compromise the mission by catching hypothermia."

Lee held the bird out at arm's length.

"Tell Ichiro to come here at eight o'clock tonight," Sasuke replied. "I'll relate the information to him then."

"Do you think I can't get it back myself?" It sounded offended.

"I want to make sure he can get in here," Sasuke replied. "Otherwise, he's useless. And I also want proof that he's out there. Considering Megumi's background and the circumstances, you'll forgive my suspicion."

The bird ruffled its feathers. "Fine. One of you, open the door."

"You can go out the window in the bedroom," Sakura replied. "That will draw less attention."

"As long as I can go," it replied acerbically.

As Lee went to let the bird out, Sakura glared at Sasuke. He returned the look impassively.

"It wasn't possible," he said. "You knew that too."

"It wasn't _im_possible!" she snapped. "It was better than resorting to--to _them!_"

"Use the weapons that are available to you," Sasuke replied. Sakura made a disgusted noise.

"If **you** don't even trust them, how can you say that to me?"

"I trust Ichiro," Sasuke replied. "He owes me. If he's here, he'll want to cancel that debt."

Sakura folded her arms. But Sasuke didn't offer any more information, so finally she set her jaw. "Then why all that?" she asked, waving a hand to indicate the hall to the bedroom. "That sure as hell sounded like you didn't trust them."

"Because I don't trust Megumi," he replied, starting to look annoyed but keeping his voice neutral. "She's sanka."

Sakura frowned. "Sanka. . . ."

"Gypsies," he clarified.

". . . _oh_," she said a moment later. "**Them**."

Lee, who'd been standing just inside the hallway for a while, decided to step back into the living room. "The term sounds familiar, but--I don't remember hearing it."

"They used to be scattered across the countries," Sakura said. "There's probably still some up in Earth and the non-village countries. They're thieves."

"They had a bad habit of hiring themselves out as ninja when trade wasn't bringing in enough money," Sasuke replied. "So when the five countries consolidated power, there was no place for them."

He sat back, resting one leg on the edge of the couch. "When a group of them wandered into Sound country, Orochimaru welcomed them to Oto unconditionally. And he punished anyone caught discriminating against them. So the second generation was raised brainwashed, thinking that because of him, they were free from persecution and dispersion for the first time in decades." He folded his arms. "And since Orochimaru died here, I don't trust her. But if Ichiro _is_ out there, she won't make trouble for us."

Sakura let out a breath. "That man. . . ."

"He was a genius at understanding people," Sasuke replied unemotionally.

She looked at him again. "Are you certain we can trust . . . that kid?"

"I told you about him before," Sasuke said. "He was my replacement. The night I left Oto, I warned him I was going." He gave Sakura a look. "He owes me his life. He'll pay it back."

She was silent for several long seconds.

"I don't like it," she said finally, with a frustrated noise. "But I guess **that** doesn't matter." She turned and stormed back into the kitchen, yanking her mask up as she went.

Sasuke gave her back another annoyed look, and then glanced to the door before standing.

"I'll be back before eight," he told Lee.

Lee nodded, but Sasuke was already pulling on his boots.

—

Sasuke went to several clothing stores, comparing the prices of fingerless gloves.

Then he went to the grocery on the far side of the village, bought milk and cheeses, crackers and some dried meat, and had it packaged. He stored it in Lee's refrigerator when he returned. Sakura deliberately refused to ask what the package was.

She also didn't ask when he only pulled two of the kitchen chairs into the living room, to stand opposite the couch, one further back than the other. She didn't need to--she had enough diplomatic training to understand the power setup he was arranging.

—

Six minutes to eight, there was a knock at the door. Sasuke answered it.

Sakura frowned when the boy entered. "Mitate-kun? Did your uncle--is something wrong at the hospital?" She gave Sasuke a sideways glance, stepping closer. "Do I need to go over there?"

The boy looked at her briefly as he stepped inside, unzipping his jacket but not removing his shoes, and then sat on the couch and stared at Sasuke. "You owe me."

Sasuke took the chair closer to the couch. "You're alive," he replied. "You still owe me for that."

"You killed Tadashi," the boy responded. "And you didn't even do it yourself, you gave him to the Sand."

"He didn't make it to Suna."

"He's still dead."

"Fine," Sasuke replied, and Ichiro blinked.

To cover the lapse, he unsnapped one of the pockets on his shirt. "Do either of you smoke?" he asked, addressing this comment to Sakura, and speaking a level politer than he had to Sasuke.

She sat down on the other chair, and Lee moved to stand to the left behind her. "No."

Ichiro snapped the pocket shut again. He gave the three of them a long look, and Sakura made herself fold her hands in her lap, to show she didn't have immediate access to weapons.

Ichiro scanned Sasuke one last time, and then finally let his guard drop enough to sit back against the couch. "That snake you sent trashed the town we were in."

Sasuke's hands tensed. "What?"

Ichiro nodded once. "We went back after we met Kyomamushi-sama and tried to get rid of the survivors, but I'm sure we missed some."

Sasuke brought one of his hands up to his face, hiding his mouth. Sakura was watching him from the corner of her eye.

"How far away was it?" he asked.

"Over a week, for normal people," Ichiro replied. "Maybe five days, if they take a boat over the gulf instead of land traveling."

"You were out on the peninsula?"

"Yeah. It was a decently isolated town, so they shouldn't be able to demand investigators before then."

"Fucking things," Sasuke hissed under his breath. Then he let his hand drop, and briefed Ichiro on the plan.

Sakura filled in other parts of it, such as where he and Konohamaru would need to meet and the exact location where they would be waiting to trade places. She silently noted that Ichiro wasn't asking why or what they were doing, only what he needed to know to for his part. Sasuke said if anything changed because of the incoming news, he would contact them.

"You don't have a time frame?" Ichiro said, when everything was covered.

"It's circumstantial," Sasuke replied.

Ichiro pursed his lips in a way that, to Sakura, looked completely wrong on Mitate's face, but he didn't speak. Instead, he indicated the faded scar along Sasuke's throat, from the time he'd briefly returned to Oto to raid the library and had made the Leaf-ingrained mistake of being merciful to non-enemies. "Is that the only change?"

"No," Sasuke replied. He pulled up his left sleeve, to reveal the scar tissue that remained from when his wrist had been broken during the last fight with Orochimaru. The fang marks were still mostly visible.

Ichiro shifted a little closer. "Those look like. . . ." He glanced at Sasuke's face, and then back at his arm.

"They are," Sasuke replied.

"Kyomamushi-sama turned on you?"

Sasuke pulled the sleeve back down. "He saved my life."

Ichiro's eyes narrowed, but Sasuke was already pulling down his collar slightly, shifting his shoulder enough to show the secondary seal around his curse seal.

"And there's this. Henge your clothing right so it won't be necessary to know."

Ichiro nodded. "What about that necklace?"

Sasuke let the collar slip back up, straightening it slightly. "Only my teacher knows I'm wearing that. If you get caught so badly that you're brought before him, you should just kill yourself."

Ichiro nodded again, lips slightly thinned.

"Do you still have that?" Sasuke asked, touching his forehead protector.

"No," Ichiro replied. "I threw it away once I left."

"Idiot," Sasuke said, and pulled off his forehead protector. "Don't waste weapons."

Ichiro frowned. "I won't--how strong _is_ he?"

". . . Above Kabuto's level," Sasuke said, unfolding a small, handleless blade from the cloth of his forehead protector. "Probably above mine, too."

Sasuke held the blade out. "If you actually manage to disable him, you should still kill yourself," he added, and left the rest of the threat unspoken.

". . . yes, Sasuke-sensei," Ichiro replied, taking it after a long pause. "Anything else?"

"What the fuck were you doing in Fire?" Sasuke said, voice neutral. "I told you to stay away."

"This is the best place to get caught," Ichiro replied. "We split paths with the others for the winter, so they aren't here."

Sasuke raised an eyebrow. "'The best place'?"

Ichiro shrugged a shoulder. "Whatever battle you had made the Leaf really heavy on its foreign treaties. Other countries run a risk if they even imprison us instead of executing us immediately. But at least here, they do it quick. I heard if a Soundnin's caught in Wind country, they cut off his head with a bamboo saw." He dragged his hand across the back of his neck.

"Don't make unnecessary gestures in enemy territory," Sasuke said reflexively, noting from his peripheral vision that Sakura had clenched one hand around the other. "How long as this been going on?"

Ichiro raised an eyebrow. "Since Oto lost its contract, and we all got declared missingnins." At Sasuke's faintest look of surprise, he added: "You didn't _know?_"

"The Hokage doesn't share her decisions with me," Sasuke replied.

"It's a common policy everywhere," Ichiro answered. ". . . Damn, they were keeping you really sheltered here, weren't they?"

Sasuke stood up. Sakura rolled onto the balls of her feet smoothly, almost at the same time that Ichiro stood, but Sasuke only made a small gesture and turned toward the kitchen.

Ichiro studied Sakura and Lee warily. She kept her face neutral, imagined what Lee's looked like, and wondered if the boy had deliberately let his guard drop so much while talking to Sasuke or if it had been a reflex. She didn't like the implications either way.

Sasuke came back, henging the package from the fridge into three scrolls similar to the kinds medicnins kept records on. "Here. Eat it soon, or most of it will spoil."

Ichiro gave the scrolls a look. "I don't need that. We're getting by fine."

"Fine," Sasuke said evenly. "It doesn't matter to me. If you starve to death, I don't have to pay back my debt."

Ichiro took them, but gave Sasuke an irritated look. "Don't you get sick of being so soft-hearted?"

"Idiot," Sasuke said again, "kindness isn't a weakness. If you use it right, it's better than poison."

Ichiro glanced poignantly at Sakura and Lee again. "Sure."

"You came, didn't you?" Sasuke replied, sliding his hands into his pockets.

Ichiro stared at him for a few moments. Then he shifted the scrolls under his other arm, and left.

When the door shut behind him, Sasuke sat down again, bracing his elbows on his knees and folding his hands in front of his mouth. Sakura went to the window, barely pushing the curtains aside to see out. Lee leaned on the back of the other chair. It was quiet.

Sakura broke the silence a full minute later. "The snake you sent to them was over a meter, wasn't it?"

"Snakes," Sasuke corrected. "Yes."

"Kakashi-sensei was there when you told us about them."

"I'm sure Tsunade and Jiraiya know, too," he replied. "Can you pull this off without me?"

"Why did you _do_ that?" Sakura demanded, angry and tired.

"The two days you said you'd been able to drug Naruto for were up by the time you told me this plan." Sasuke sat back in the chair, folding his arms. His voice was quieter when he said, "I didn't know they were so close."

". . . How many?" she asked.

Lee was looking between the both of them by now, trying to figure out what they were talking around instead of about; Sasuke ignored him. "They said they would contact me about the price later."

"You say that so **easily**--"

"How do you do the work you don't like, Sakura?"

There was a dark silence, and then Sakura let out a long breath.

"A kunoichi must be able to kill her heart when necessary," she muttered, and turned away from the window.

Sasuke was still facing the couch, but Lee was watching her. His fingers tightened against the chair slightly as he saw the calm, emotionless look on her face and in her movements.

He'd seen the expression on her before, though not often. And as a jounin, Lee was familiar with the inner detachment that granted it. It wasn't something he liked.

"I think I can do it," Sakura replied, walking to the sofa and then changing her mind and returning to the chair. "Unless they increase security around me."

"I can get back inside if they do."

"We can't fight a whole ANBU squad."

"We don't need to fight," Lee said. "Just to run."

He reached down and took her hand. "Sasuke-kun and I can trade places; we'll say I went with you as emotional support. As long as we can get outside the wall, we'll still be able to teleport to the tree and follow the plan."

Sakura nodded slowly, thinking it over, and absently rubbed her thumb over the back of his hand. "That'll have to do . . . is that boy good at henge? Will he be able to pull off looking like Lee?"

"Yes," Sasuke replied. "It won't be perfect, but it will be enough to get you out."

"Right," Sakura said, and her thumb stopped even as her voice stayed the same. "Is he the one that you talked about before? The one that can alter his DNA to someone else's with a sample of it?"

"Get to the point," Sasuke replied.

"Tell them to send Mitate-kun back," she said coldly. "Tonight."

Sasuke closed his eyes. "He'll already be dead."

Sakura's hand was painfully tight around Lee's own, her other fist clenched on her lap. Lee was beginning to worry that she was going to go for Sasuke's kidneys, and wasn't sure if he wanted to make her stop until at least the second punch.

"I work with his _uncle_," Sakura hissed. "How can I. . . ."

"His uncle's going to autopsy the hunternins we kill," Sasuke replied, opening his eyes and staring at the couch again. "He would have been able to describe them if he lived."

Sakura didn't speak.

Finally, she stood, yanked her chair up, and carried it back to the kitchen. Sasuke took the cue and left.

—

When Lee brought the second chair into the kitchen, Sakura was sitting with her arms folded on the table, forehead pressed against them. Lee set his chair down next to her and rested a hand lightly on her upper back.

"He was only there for two years!" she burst out, voice choked and muffled. "Why can't he figure out he's not supposed to act like--he's **ours**!"

Lee wrapped his arms awkwardly around her waist and rested his cheek against her back. "I'm sorry, Sakura. This wasn't. . . ."

"It's perfectly logical," Sakura whispered. "But so many people . . . is he--it really . . . worth. . . ?"

It took Lee a long time to reply, and when he did, his voice was so quiet and careful it was almost incomprehensible. "Could we still go back?"

Sakura was still for a long time, and Lee waited.

At last she sat up, and shifted so that she could sit with her head against Lee's shoulder. Her eyes were dry.

"I . . . don't . . ." she murmured, staring at the table and the cabinets beyond it. "--I hate that chair," she said suddenly, "that stupid fourth chair. I hate that second set of guest dishes. I see them in here everyday and I hate them so much and I don't want to throw them away. I don't want to. . . ."

Sakura tilted her neck so that her temple was resting against his jaw. "I already lost them before. . . ."

Lee closed his eyes. They stayed there for a long time.

——

Earlier that evening, there had been a small fire in the Hyuuga compound's main garden.

As Hinata told the clan head and elders when she was called in to explain, she had been weeding the herb beds in the late afternoon, and since she had almost been finished when the sky began to darken, she decided to bring a lamp out and finish the last bed rather than waiting until morning. As she was cleaning the gardening tools, she accidentally knocked the lamp over with her heel. Hinata had immediately straightened it, but she'd failed to notice that a small bit of spilled oil had caught fire. It continued burning after she left the garden through the gate to the branch house area, the gate which was cattycorner on the left to the two wintry poisonous plants kept in the Hyuuga garden, a large patch of wolfsbane and several plants of water hemlock. Both plants were almost completely burnt by the time someone in the main house looked through the wall and called the situation to attention.

When Hinata was asked how she could possibly justify allowing the fire to happen, she replied quietly from the position where she was kneeling, face tilted to the floor: "I didn't see it."

None of the elders spoke for a moment. Finally, Hinata's uncle on her mother's side cleared his throat.

"Even with your injury, Hinata-san, this is an inexcusable mis--"

"No," Hanabi interrupted. She raised a hand when her uncle tried to continue. "It was a small fire, and they're just plants. They can be replanted later."

She looked down at Hinata. "You're a member of the branch house now. There's no reason for you to come to the main house's garden any longer."

"Yes, Hanabi-sama," Hinata replied.

—

A few people protested about the decision with Hanabi, but they sent Hinata out of the room first. Neji was waiting for her in the hallway.

"That was foolish of you," he said quietly, as they were walking down the path between the main and branch houses. "That story was too flimsy to last for long."

"I know," Hinata murmured. "But . . . I was desperate."

"Obviously," Neji replied.

——

The next morning, Sasuke woke up before dawn and began packing.

The unobvious things went first, paper money lining his weapons pouch and folded into the double-hemmed waist of his pants, coins separated by tissues packed flat into small bags that could be strapped around his legs with bandages--impractical, but the metal coins were uncommon in normal villages, so he had to spend the paper ryo first anyway.

There wasn't much money; he planned to visit the bank in the afternoon, and withdraw more than he needed to buy gloves. There were no spare clothes to pack until he did the laundry. The weapons would be on him even indoors.

He had a light breakfast, getting rid of some of the vegetables, and then put everything in the apartment away. The dishes and cooking utensils were packed into the cabinets, and he stowed the bedding, table, and chest for his clothes and weapons in the bathroom. The curtains were already pulled closed, and the sunlight was too weak to force itself through the dark fabric (he liked sunlight, his old apartment had floor-to-ceiling windows and a large balcony, but it was possible to see into his room from the opposite roof and when Sakura had asked him to store those scrolls for her he couldn't take the risk of flimsy curtains) when Sasuke began practicing his sword work.

The first movements were spoiled--his muscles were tense, and it affected his swing. Sasuke made himself resheath the katana and begin over again and again until he had returned to the graceful state he'd mastered by the time he left Oto. Once he was able to draw the katana, make three sweeping cuts, and sheath it again fluidly five times in a row, he began adding the shake, footwork, and additional cuts.

The apartment was too small for him to move properly--the bathroom intruded offensively into the room, cutting away almost a fourth of his space. It interfered when he practiced taijutsu, too, same as the kitchenette. The main room of his apartment at Oto had been larger, had been intended for him to practice in it. He'd spent most winter mornings training in there--though Orochimaru had chosen the location of Oto to guarantee mild winters, the man had still hated the cold, and the rare snowfalls and frosts in the Sound had generally signaled complete if temporary freedom. The children had ditched their classes en masse and held snowball fights; Sasuke had trained through the mornings and then spent the afternoons hunting down students with Kazuo if it was a frost, or trained through the afternoons and evenings if it was snow.

There had been something quiet in opening the curtains there and knowing that snow was falling outside his window, even if he couldn't always see it in the course of his movements. He didn't know if the snow that was threatening last night was falling now.

Sasuke decided if he drew one more parallel, he was going to drag the table back in and hack at it with the sword until one or the other broke; and he needed the sword. He dropped the footwork and returned to the basic pattern of draw, cut, shake, sheath until the tension was gone again.

After half an hour, the work had made him hot enough to remove his long-sleeved shirt and just keep the short-sleeved one beneath, despite the fact that the room was as cold as he could stand to cut down his heating bill. He threw it into the bathroom and the necklace--hanging loose without the heavy shirt to cover it--shifted as he moved.

As he drew the sword again, Sasuke reflected that the items he'd collected from his various teachers didn't match their natures. Orochimaru's katana was a weapon, it almost fit; but Itachi's necklace was nothing but a frivolous piece of jewelry, something that weighed Sasuke down while serving no purpose and that had the potential to give him away with the faint noise of its links. Kakashi's indecipherable patience was tattooed on his skin in a seal he could negate at will--Sasuke would have assumed it symbolized trust, if he thought Kakashi was a fool.

He had nothing from Naruto. Kabuto had healed the burn marks of the rasengan without his permission.

His next cut was tense, the tip wobbled and he didn't remember to push his hips forward with the motion. Sasuke stopped, sheathed the sword, and breathed.

When he finally drew it again, he had stripped away his emotions like layers until there was nothing beneath his skin but muscle and organs and chakra and bones; a body that was a tool, the weapon he worked best with because it had been his since birth.

He didn't keep track of time after that. When Sakura knocked on his door, his back and shoulders were beginning to ache.

Sasuke sheathed the sword but carried it with him to the door, tucking the necklace beneath his shirt. Sakura had never met Itachi, wouldn't recognize it--but the scorch marks on it would've been enough of a clue for her.

She didn't say anything when she came in. Sasuke shut the door behind her and said, "Any news?"

"About . . . no. Nothing." Sakura wandered over to the kitchen sink. "I guess he's still asleep."

Sasuke set the katana against the wall and folded his arms; Sakura leaned against the sink and stared at the floor.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Sasuke paused. Then he caught himself and shrugged a shoulder. "You were righ--"

"No," Sakura interrupted, "you're not heartless, Sasuke, even if you're still trying to pretend like it. I'm sorry I forgot that."

He looked down at the ground, fingers tightening around the loose fabric of his sleeves. ". . . I knew he would probably imitate someone to get in. I should have added that the timeframe was indefinite, and they would have left him alive. That was my mistake." Sasuke made himself look at her. "I'm sorry it was someone you knew."

"He won't be the first," she murmured after a long pause. Sakura looked over at him. "One of the hunternins is going to be Kakashi-sensei, isn't it? He's the only one left with the sharingan. He'll be sent for you."

Sasuke looked away and nodded. Sakura stared back down at the floor.

"I don't want to fight Tsunade-sensei," she said quietly. "She did a lot more for us than I understood. She kept letting Naruto live, she let us try to rehabilitate you instead of. . . ." Sakura wrapped her hands around her upper arms. "She only restricted me to missions in Fire. I could have been executed for espionage. Anywhere else. . . . I don't want to make Lee fight Gai-san."

Sasuke leaned back against the wall. "Jiraiya will come for Naruto." He paused, and then shook his head. "And Tsunade's going to be hell to fight, if her strength's natural. If they come for us together. . . ."

Sakura looked a little wide-eyed at the thought, and let out a breath. "We'll have to get Lee drunk."

Sasuke looked at her.

"He's a master of the drunken fist," Sakura explained.

". . . ah."

She fidgeted her fingers against her sleeves for a moment. ". . . What do we do? About Mitate-kun?" Sakura asked.

Sasuke looked to the stove past her and didn't answer for a moment. "If Naruto doesn't wake up before that kid's absence starts to raise alarms, I'll leave earlier," he said. "That will draw their attention, and when the news of the snakes comes in, they'll probably assume I killed him for some reason. Stick to the plan as much as possible."

Sakura exhaled and shivered.

She covered it up a moment later by starting to rub her arms, and glanced around the room. "Why's it so cold in here?"

Sasuke welcomed the change in topic. "Heat's expensive."

Sakura gave him a look. "How long have you--oh, never mind." She paused, and then let her hands drop and folded them in front of her. "Come back to our place after work. You'll get sick like this."

"It will be more trouble if I'm over there when the news comes in," Sasuke warned.

Sakura raised an eyebrow slightly. "Do you think that kid lied about the time?"

"There's no way to gauge how fast unknown people will travel the roads."

"Don't answer me like that," Sakura muttered, but there was no real irritation in her voice.

"We're already gambling everything," she added. "One more factor isn't going to make things much worse."

"Fine," Sasuke said.

—

Lee wasn't happy about what had happened--Sasuke could tell from the way he didn't speak much during their lunch break--but he seemed to have accepted the inevitability of it. He still wasn't talking as vibrantly by the time they returned to the apartment, and found that Sakura had been sent home early again and had cooked too much food for dinner for a lack of anything else to do.

Sakura brought over Sasuke's laundry and the rest of his weapons while Lee was putting the leftovers away and Sasuke went to the bank before it closed. She told him to buy some extra clothes for Naruto, in winter colors, and two coats.

——

Sasuke woke up early the next morning when he realized someone was shaking him. Sakura caught his fist and yanked him off the couch.

Sasuke blinked the sleep from his eyes, frowning in groggy irritation. "What--"

And then he saw the bird sitting on the small table in front of Lee, preening its feathers. There was a message attached to its leg.

Sasuke, like Sakura and Lee, could first only react with silence.

". . . It has to be Naruto," Sakura finally said. "There would have been some noise, fighting, if he woke up and it was. . . ."

"Tsunade would have made contingency plans," Sasuke replied, still rubbing his wrist.

Sakura gripped her hands around her arms. "It's the _fox demon_," she whispered. "We would have heard _something_."

"Maybe," he said, unwilling to hope.

They continued to stare at the bird; it was Lee who finally picked it up and removed the message from its leg. He hesitated at opening it, however, and after several more seconds Sasuke held out his hand.

Lee dropped the message onto his palm. Sakura moved closer to Lee as Sasuke opened it, leaning against him and wrapping her hands around his arm. He tilted his head toward hers.

Sasuke skimmed the message and said, "He's awake."

Sakura exhaled, Lee pulled her into a hug, and Sasuke read the message again.

"We're supposed to meet her in her office at nine p.m.," Sasuke added. "She'll supply the poison you're to use." He held the paper out to Sakura. "Apparently, she doesn't trust you."

Sakura laughed once, breathily, and studied the message herself. Lee read it over her shoulder.

"Tonight--that's more time than I thought we'd--" Sakura shook her head. "Why would--unless she thought we have a lot to say and didn't want to risk him being moved in daylight . . . so _lucky_. . . ."

"Breathe," Lee said, with a shaky smile.

"Hah," Sakura breathed. She looked down at the message once more.

Then she started folding it, looking up at Sasuke as she creased the corners. "Can you get a message to those Soundnins? Now, while it's still dark?"

Sasuke nodded and went down the hall to the bedroom.

Sakura pulled away from Lee and began pacing along the living room. "I'll have to send a slug to--no, I can't use them." She frowned. "I shouldn't get her involved, anyway. . . ."

"I can speak to Hi--" Lee paused when they heard a whistle from the bedroom. A few moments later, Sasuke began giving instructions.

Sakura glared at the short hallway. "Has that bird been **following**--augh!" She turned her back to it and looked at Lee. "You can get a message to Hinata-chan?"

"Yes," he replied. "Her room is around Neji's--I'll find a way to see her."

Sakura nodded. "That'll do." She looked back to Sasuke, who was returning to the room. "Lee's going to contact Hinata-chan. Will that bird get to them in time?"

"It said it will," Sasuke replied. "Either he'll be in the alley with Konohamaru or he won't."

"_Konohamaru-kun_," Sakura exhaled. "I've got to speak to him, too, and tell him the timeframe. Okay. Anyone else?"

She looked at Sasuke and at Lee, who shook his head. Sasuke thought over it, and repeated the motion.

"Okay," Sakura said. She breathed quietly for a few moments, and then looked down at the folded square of paper in her hand and said: "I need tea."

—

The sun was just starting to break the horizon when they finished breakfast. Lee looked at the clock, and stood abruptly.

"All right!" he announced. "This is almost the time Gai-sensei will be at the training fields. I'm going to go start my workout early. I'll go to Neji's after that."

"I'll pack our things," Sakura said. "Ino-chan's shop won't be open for hours, and Konohamaru-kun won't leave his house for at least another hour. . . . Sasuke?"

"Do you have cleaning supplies?" he asked.

———

Lee trained with Gai until the sun was fully in the sky, and then he suggested that they see if Tenten and Neji wanted to join.

Neji was still under technical house arrest. As he tried to convince Gai that there was no reason for the man to speak to Hanabi on his behalf, Lee slipped aside and told Hinata the news under pretext of relating a question from Sakura about some herbs. He was surprised to learn about the incident with the garden, but thanked her for trying her best and promised to tell Sakura about it.

Neji was still losing his argument with Gai when Hinata said stumblingly that she had been hoping to train with him that morning. Lee immediately said that family came first--they could have a full-team sparring match another day.

Gai agreed, and they left for Tenten's house.

——

Sakura contacted Konohamaru when he left his house to meet his team for another day's training.

He grew a little pale as she explained when he needed to be at the alley and who would be with him (she referred to Ichiro as someone Sasuke had called a favor from rather than as a Soundnin), but said that he would be ready. After she sent him on his way, she went back to the apartment and finished packing, and then headed to the Yamanaka flower shop.

"Ino-chan!" she called as she pushed open the door.

"Huh? Sakura?"

"Can you sneak out?" Sakura asked, leaning on the counter. "I found some great patterns for my wedding kimono, but I can't pick between the five of them."

Ino studied her face for a moment, and then smirked. "Yeah, sure. Let me talk to my dad--if I tell him you'll wind up making a horrible choice without my better taste to guide you, he'll let me leave."

Sakura rolled her eyes and made a shooing motion. As Ino went into the back room, yelling for her father, she picked up a pale asphodel and smelled it.

—

The woman running the fabric store they went to allowed them to look around all they liked if they promised to come back for an hour tomorrow and help her finish moving her merchandise into her newly-patched storeroom.

"I can't decide!" Sakura moaned, staring at the two bolts they had narrowed the selection down to. "What do you think, Ino-chan? The white and gold or the shades of green?"

Ino gave the green a critical look. "The pattern is nice, except for the brown twigs. Brown's not a good marriage color. But the white and gold is so _standard_ . . . and white washes your complexion out. . . ."

Sakura leaned her elbows on the counter and gave her a look. "Don't feel the need to soften your opinion, Ino-pig-chan."

"**You** asked."

She stuck out her tongue and looked back down at the bolts. "I think I like the green."

"I don't like the brown in it." Ino dropped the green bolt on top of the white and gold one. "Maybe we should look at another store."

"Ugh," Sakura muttered, "I don't want to be beholden to work somewhere _else_, too."

"Lazy!"

Sakura shoved away from the counter. "I'll look at them again when we come to move stuff. Maybe I'll be able to decide then." She frowned thoughtfully as she put the bolts back on their shelves. "I really should go with the green, though . . . it almost matches my forehead protector. . . ."

Ino paused and stared at her. "You're not seriously going to wear your forehead protector at your wedding. How tacky is _that_, Sakura?"

"Well, I don't have anything else to keep my bangs out of my eyes!" Sakura retorted defensively. "They won't be long enough by then to pull back, and I don't want to have to shop for a headband. It still makes me feel uncomfortable."

Ino stared for five more seconds, and then grabbed Sakura's arm and started dragging her out of the store. "You're **hopeless**!"

"OW! Ino-chan! Let _go!_"

—

Ino tossed a white scarf, a gold headband, a green ribbon and a brown scarf to Sakura and shut her dresser drawer. "There. Try those on, and whichever one looks best on you, that's the color fabric you're getting."

After trying all the colors in several different hairstyles, they both decided that the green worked best. Ino kept trying to get Sakura to take off her headband so they could fix her hair properly, but Sakura consistently refused.

"I _told_ you, it got scarred during the battle. I'm not showing it off."

"Showing it--" Ino put her hands on her hips. "Come **on**, Sakura, do you think I _care?_ It's just a scar. We're kunoichi; it's not going to be the first. Stop being so vain."

Sakura cast a very significant look to Ino's right ear. The bandage was still visible through the bangs she had brushed over it.

(While Chouji was possessed, he had hooked a shuriken through the earring in Ino's right ear and ripped it out, taking most of the lobe with it. Ino had let him, because the action enabled her to land a non-fatal blow and knock him back just far enough that Shikamaru--who hadn't been able to move fast because of a shattered ankle--could reach him with his shadow.

Ino had made Shikamaru promise never to tell Chouji how it'd happened on threat of her taking over his body and doing horrible things with it. Shikamaru had rolled his eyes and said he wasn't going to, anyway.)

"That's different," Ino said primly. "I actually have to _rely_ on my looks on a mission."

Sakura raised an eyebrow. "Bandages _are_ so stylish these days."

"They're going to come off in another day or two," Ino said grumpily. "**You're** the one who said I'd be risking an infection."

Sakura frowned. "Let me see it. It shouldn't be that bad by now."

After Sakura pulled Ino's hair up and removed the bandages, she burned away a small infection that was beginning, and gave the healing-over skin just enough of a nudge to finish. Then she studied her work.

"Mm, it might scab a little more, but you'll be okay." Sakura looked over at the dresser. "Where do you keep your brush? With your hair's body, I'm sure it can be styled to hide it."

"It's in the bathroom," Ino replied.

When Sakura had fetched the brush and some lock-picks that doubled as bobby pins, Ino let her make several attempts to fix her hair. She complained with each one, and told Sakura she really needed to stop doing more than shoving some gel in her hair and tearing out the door each morning. Sakura told her to shut up, they didn't all have time to primp.

"I'm glad you're feeling better," Ino said suddenly.

"Huh?" Sakura replied.

Ino waved a hand at the mirror Sakura had angled to face the bed they were sitting on. "The last time we went shopping, you looked like . . . you were about to go on a suicide mission the next day, or something." She let her hand drop. ". . . I'm glad you're okay now."

"I'm not," Sakura replied.

Ino twisted her head around to glance at her. "What?"

Sakura made an exasperated noise and forced Ino's head back to the front. She began fixing the pins that had pulled loose as she explained: "It shouldn't have happened like that. He shouldn't be gone . . . and I hope I _don't_ get over that. I don't care 'what' he was, he was my teammate." Sakura paused, and then shrugged a shoulder and picked up another pin. "But he's dead. I can't fix something like that, so. . . ."

". . . Right," Ino said a moment later. "At least you and Lee are alive."

Sakura sighed, but it was silently and to herself--she'd long ago gotten used to the fact that Ino didn't catch some things unless they were spelled out. "Yeah. . . ."

—

When she was planning to leave, Sakura picked up the brown scarf and held it over her hair again. "Hmm. . . ."

"_No_," Ino replied, pulling bobby pins out of her hair and brushing out the tangles. "We already decided on the green."

"I know, I know . . . Ino-chan, will you let me borrow this?" Sakura dropped her hands and turned partly around to look at the other teenager. "Maybe if the scarf is brown, it'll even out the tones."

Ino gave it a deliberate look. "I don't think it's the same color. It's too light."

"Really? I thought it was almost similar. . . ." Sakura draped the scarf over the top of her head again. "Please let me borrow it, so I can go by the store again and check? I'll give it back when I see you tomorrow."

Ino glanced upward. "All right, all right! You can have it, if you want," she added, looking aside to the mirror. "I've got plenty."

". . . ." Sakura smiled. "Thanks, Ino-chan."

"Did you _deliberately_ put all these tangles in my hair or what?" Ino replied.

——

The first thing Sasuke did was teleport into Naruto apartment and search through it until he found the metal box containing the most secret of the Uchiha clan's scrolls. It was still buried under the same pile of junk in the closet; Sasuke almost mistook it for a sock before he noticed the faint trace of chakra that gave away the henge.

He forced Naruto's henge off and put his own on, turning it into another bottle of cleaning solution. Then he made his way to the compound and spent the morning and early afternoon cleaning the graves of his parents and close relatives.

By the time his stomach was growling irritatedly, his parents, immediate aunts and uncles, and first cousins had been taken care of. Sasuke debated leaving offerings, but decided they wouldn't want them.

After he set the cleaning supplies on the street out to the main gate, he returned to his parents' grave and stared at it for a long time, tugging absently at the ends of his new gloves.

Then he bowed from the waist.

"I apologize, Father," Sasuke said. "I taught our jutsus to an outsider. And I too have found something more important to me than the clan. I renounce my right to call myself your son.

"But I swear I will never follow after my brother."

He straightened and turned away.

The necklace felt heavier as he walked off. Sasuke told himself he was imagining it.

—

The next place he went was the storage building near the back of his house, where he rummaged around until he found a slightly rusted chisel and hammer. Then he made his way to the Takano shrine.

Once he was underground, Sasuke lit one of the torches and then set about methodically destroying every line of information on the stone. By the time he was finished, the hunger had turned to nausea which had faded back to nothing again, and his hands ached. He rubbed them together as he scanned the chipped-up stone, making sure that no line was visible enough to give anything away to those who would eventually find this place.

When the soreness had mostly left, Sasuke brushed away some stray fragments of the rock face and thought, _I should have done this last time. If there had been nothing at all to come back for. . . ._

_. . . If I had never seen him again. . . ._

He let his hand drop and set about the business of burning all the scrolls, trusting that Sakura had memorized them.

—

Sasuke had intended to force himself to enter the house, to go through and see if there were any small items they could carry and pawn later--his mother's few bits of jewelry or some particularly finely crafted weapons--but once he was standing outside he realized that he couldn't. He touched the door and immediately thought back, not to the night of the murders, but to Itachi's last mangekyou, where the house was safe and clean and his parents might have been just down the hall, and stepped back so abruptly that he almost tripped over the edge of the porch.

_You'll regret this when we run out of money_, Sasuke told himself viciously. _Every job we get may attract the hunternins' attention. It's just a fucking empty house_.

Then he thought: _Let it die. I don't have to confront anything. It's not about. . . ._

Sasuke stared at the ground for a few more minutes, and finally snorted. _There's nothing here to be redeemed_.

He picked up the bucket containing the cleaning supplies from where it had been sitting in the street, and left.

—

He didn't visit Kakashi. He didn't feel the need to--they would be able to say their goodbyes later, when the man was sent after him.

———

Sakura had taken over the kitchen with herbs and scrolls and syringes, and was stewing leaves in a pot, so Sasuke put the cleaning supplies back and ate the few remaining rice crackers before packing his things.

Later, he heard the rustle of Sakura removing her mask, and then a sigh. Sasuke glanced up from the weapons packs he was rearranging to see her bracing her arms against the counter.

"What is it?" he asked.

"This is my best," she replied bleakly, and Sasuke looked up fully.

"What's wrong?"

"This is basically poison," Sakura replied, still staring down at the counter. "If I give him too much, he'll die. If I give him too little, he'll wake up too early. I don't know the exact dosage I need to give."

Sasuke frowned. When he didn't speak, Sakura turned around, leaning back against the counter and folding her arms. "He's always required a little more than other people in anesthesias and stuff once the fox demon's chakra got a hold," she explained. "It used to only be a couple milligrams, but at the worst point, he had to have two and a half times the regular amount for drugs to have the same affect." She made a little frustrated motion with her hands. "And now I don't know how much he's affected by its chakra."

"Why can't you just under-drug him?" Sasuke asked.

She folded her arms again. "The side-effects. When it starts to wear off, he'll be vomiting, disoriented, blurry sight . . . until it's out of his system, there's no way we'll be able to move." She started to rub at her eyes, aggravated from the poison's fumes. "I made it to keep him out for an hour to give us a decent head start, but if I dilute it, he could wake up in anywhere from 45 minutes to less than fifteen."

Sasuke leaned his arms on his legs, and studied her.

"What dosage do you think you should give him?" he asked a few moments later.

Sakura folded her arms once again, and stared down at the floor for a few moments.

". . . Based on what Hinata-chan told me about his chakra, I'd give him 1.8 of the regular dose," she replied.

"Then do that," Sasuke said, looking back to the weapons packs.

"But I'm only doing this on hearsay and guessing from what he was like earli--"

"When was the last time you screwed up with medicine, Sakura?" Sasuke asked without looking up. He removed another two shuriken from one of the packs and tested the weight. "If you think that's what's right, do it. Stop vacillating."

". . . You are such an ass," Sakura replied, but she was biting down the start of a relieved smile as she turned back to the counter.

—

Sakura teleported to Naruto's and packed his weapons while Sasuke was cooking and Lee was cleaning down the apartment. Sasuke had borrowed some of the clothes Lee was leaving behind long enough to wash his own with unscented detergent, the same as Sakura and Lee had done earlier.

Their dinner was mostly rice and the few stray vegetables that hadn't been finished off yet. Lee had bought two anpan rolls on his way back, for Sasuke and Sakura, since he didn't like sweet things much.

Lee left as soon as the night fell, after changing his clothes for ones in winter grays and browns. He took all the henged backpacks and weapons pouches, and Sasuke's sword, with him. Sasuke and Sakura kept two older packs which contained only as many kunai and shuriken as were necessary to prevent them from being too light.

Sakura's hair was still damp from the shower she'd taken when she pulled it back in a ponytail and dressed in the same colors. She stuck an unpoisoned needle in it, and also hid two short poisoned ones in her belt--one behind the buckle and the other at the small of her back. She henged the syringe she'd filled into a small, thin cylinder and tucked it into her bra.

Sasuke managed to fit a single shuriken behind the plate of his forehead protector. His hair had dried by the time he pulled his own clothes on, folded Lee's, and set them back in the drawer. His clothes were still black, but he'd bought a dark brown coat when he picked up the new clothes and jacket for Naruto.

They had a quarter of an hour before they needed to start out for the Hokage's tower. Sasuke spent the time walking slowly around the apartment and examining everything. He rearranged a few of the scrolls in the shelves, filling in the gaps from where Sakura had either taken or destroyed scrolls, and then went to the kitchen and checked again that all the appliances were unplugged.

Sakura was sitting on the couch, legs crossed, hands folded, and eyes closed. She'd been like that for the last ten minutes.

Sasuke came back out of the kitchen and stood in the living room for a few moments, hands in pockets. Then he sat down on the floor and began to stretch his legs. He kept an eye on the clock.

When they had five minutes left, Sasuke straightened and said Sakura's name.

She unfolded her hands first, and let them rest palms down on her knees before opening her eyes.

"We can't tell him," she said. "About the plan. If we do, he'll never agree to let us be missingnins. He'll yell and alert the whole tower if he thinks he has to."

"I know," Sasuke replied.

"1.8 percent will be enough," Sakura said, "it won't be too much," and the tone of her voice made it hard to figure out which one of them she meant to convince.

"I trust your skill," he said. "Are you ready to go?"

Sakura looked him in the eyes.

"We're not going to play their game of falling apart in pieces," she said with icy conviction. "Either all three of us get out or they take all three of us down. Right?"

Sasuke studied her face for a moment, and nodded.

Sakura let out her breath.

". . . This is so not the way I expected things to be," she added, with a faint, wry smile. "At our team assignments. You know?"

"I didn't expect anything," Sasuke replied, standing. "Except to be held back."

Sakura rolled her eyes and stood as well. "Glad we proved you wrong."

He gave her a look from the corner of his eye, and she smirked.

Sasuke turned off the lights in the kitchen while Sakura buttoned up her jacket. She held his coat out to him when he reached her, and turned off the living room and entryway lights as he pulled it on. Then she set the key on the window ledge, hidden from outside sight by the curtain, and didn't bother to lock the door when they left.

—

After a strange walk through the village that felt longer than it was, they arrived at the Hokage tower. Tsunade's note had been to Sakura, but she looked less than surprised to see Sasuke walk through the door as well. Jiraiya was standing to the side of the windows behind her, leaning against the wall with his arms folded.

"Weapons," Tsunade said, indicating a space on the desk that had been cleared.

When they had unstrapped their packs, and Sakura removed the needle in her hair, and set them on the desk, Jiraiya stepped forward. Sasuke kept his face blank as the man patted him down.

Sakura did the same at first, but when Jiraiya moved to her torso, she pulled back. "Can Tsunade-sama do that? Please?"

Jiraiya gave her a look, but Tsunade sighed and stood up, and he stepped aside. She shot him a glare as she cursorily patted down Sakura's chest and stomach, and he held his hands up in irritated innocence.

Tsunade found the needle behind Sakura's belt buckle and pulled it out, giving her a hard look. "Why were you concealing this?"

"In case," Sasuke answered.

"In case what," Tsunade replied in the same flat tone, looking at him.

Sasuke slid the shuriken out from beneath his forehead, hoping that they wouldn't choose to search them all over again, because he doubted Tsunade would be distracted enough to miss the syringe in Sakura's bra this time. Sakura pulled the second needle from the back of her belt and held it out as well.

"In case we had to convince anyone that we are going to bury him **alone**," Sasuke said, keeping his eyes focused on Tsunade as she took the last of their physical weapons. "We don't want him to end up in a grave like Orochimaru's."

Sakura managed not to fidget at Sasuke's words; with the looks Jiraiya and Tsunade were giving him, it wasn't easy.

Finally, Tsunade turned and walked back to her desk. "You can bury him however you like," she said, dropping the needles and shuriken on top of the two packs, "after the anbu has ascertained that he's dead and he's been cremated. As long as no one sees you."

She opened one of the drawers and pulled out a small, capped syringe, before motioning for Sakura to step forward. Sakura tucked the syringe into the front of her belt with a blank expression as the older woman gave her instructions on the way to administer the poison.

"You two can go," Tsunade then said, sitting back down in the chair. "Be done before sunrise."

"Yes," Sakura replied. Sasuke said nothing.

——

"Son of an arrogant bastard," Jiraiya muttered after the door closed behind the two teenagers, and added a few more comments on the Uchiha family as a whole. Tsunade raised an eyebrow, staring down at the packs, the needles and the shuriken, with her hands folded in front of her mouth.

Jiraiya sank down into the chair that he'd pulled up to the desk earlier and leaned back, staring past Tsunade's shoulder, out the windows.

"I don't like that that brat Kakashi chose to train him instead of Naruto," he added angrily. "Never did, even if it wasn't because of prejudice. They both lacked families."

"Naruto was a lot stronger," she replied quietly, thinking back to the reports she'd read on Itachi.

"I didn't say I didn't understand it," Jiraiya said, folding his arms. "Just that I don't like it."

"I wish he hadn't smiled at us," Tsunade said, and fingered the necklace that had returned to her for the last time.

Jiraiya looked away from the windows and didn't reply.

——

A masked anbu escorted them to the short corridor, and left them in Yuugao's care. She unlocked the door, then stood aside and held it open for them.

She shut it behind them, and they could hear her lean against it outside. Naruto, who'd been kicking the roof of the cage for lack of anything better to do, had quit and was staring at them with pale red eyes.

". . . Yo," he said after several silent moments.

". . . Hi," Sakura replied.

The cage was too short for Naruto to be able to sit on the bed, so he wound up bracing his elbow on the cot and holding himself as high as he could. "Are you guys okay?"

"Yeah," Sakura said. "Yeah. We're okay."

"That's good," Naruto replied. After another lapse into awkward silence, he shifted the weight on his elbow.

Sakura cast a sideways glance at Sasuke, and realized from the look on his face that he was still trying to figure out where to start. She interlaced her fingers and pressed them against her stomach lightly, trying to hide the syringe in her belt with her forearm, and she wasn't hard enough to look at his face as she said, "We . . . we came . . . we were sent to, to. . . ."

"I know," Naruto said, and Sakura looked up.

He was pulling off a good smile. "They--I knew this would happen, eventually. When that crap with the wards first started, Jiraiya told me if I wasn't careful. . . ."

"What?" Sasuke said.

Naruto shoved his bangs back. "Hey, don't sound like that. They're not happy about it, they're just . . ." he lapsed, looking for a word, and went with "old. You know, good at covering stuff. . . ."

He trailed off again, and glanced down at the cot. Then he looked back up.

"I kind of hoped it would be you guys," he said. "If it couldn't be a mission."

Sakura swallowed, and Sasuke glanced over to note that she was pressing her fingers tightly enough that the knuckles were white. He looked back to the cage, not quite at Naruto.

". . . How's the rebuilding?" Naruto asked.

"You heard?" Sasuke replied, when Sakura didn't speak.

"Yeah," he said, with a nod. "When Kakashi-sensei came in, he mentioned it."

Sasuke frowned. "Kakashi-sensei was already here?"

"Yeah," Naruto said again. "This morning, I guess. He said some stuff about the village and you guys, and. . . ." He shrugged. "Teacher stuff."

He paused, then added: "He said I'd grown up well." Naruto tried another grin. "I think _that's_ when I knew . . . I mean, a compliment from that guy. . . ."

When he dropped the sentence, Sasuke slid his hands in his pockets and said, "Most of the buildings are getting rebuilt. They're still working on the part of the wall Gaara trashed."

Naruto snorted. "Way to treat your allies," he muttered without irritation, "smashing their defenses. . . ."

"Why are you just _accepting_ this?" Sakura demanded quietly. "Naruto!"

He paused, and then said, "Sasuke, can you get rid of the damn barrier on this thing?"

The barrier on the cage was a strong one--it had been done by a real onmyouji, and it was also reinforced by several seals painted on the floor around the room. Sasuke had to burn away an entire side before it finally weakened. Naruto was still looking at Sakura when he said, "Come here."

She stepped up to the cage, but when Naruto reached out to pull off her forehead protector, she jerked back. He just watched her.

Sakura clenched her fists. "Look," she said roughly, "I don't care what they told you--"

"Nobody had to tell me," he replied. "I remembered." He wouldn't look away from her eyes. "I couldn't get control back. I'm _sorry_, Sakura-chan."

"Don't--" and then her words choked off. A moment later, she turned around.

Naruto looked away from her, to the ground. Then he glanced up at Sasuke, started to say something, and stopped.

"Hey," he went with instead, "what about--Itachi?"

"Dead," Sasuke said. Naruto nodded.

". . . I took care of the shark-guy," he added. "Like I said I would."

"I noticed," Sasuke replied dryly, but that wasn't what he wanted to say, it was reflex, ". . . thank you."

Naruto scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. "Did they have to rebuild those walls, too?"

"Not as much."

"Damn," Naruto muttered, "it got that out of hand. . . ."

"Don't say it in that tone," Sakura replied, still facing away from the two of them. "There was no way to kill them without a lot of destruction. And they did worse."

"Yeah, but--"

"I'm **glad** they're dead, those real monsters," Sakura added viciously. "The wall can be rebuilt."

". . . Yeah," Naruto acquiesced. He shifted the weight on his elbow again.

"What about Iruka-sensei?" he asked, looking at Sasuke since Sakura still had her back turned. "He didn't come. Is he okay? All I could get out of the hag was that he was one of the possessed ones."

"He's okay," Sakura lied, turning around, and Naruto's gaze shifted back to her. Sasuke noticed that she had traded out the syringes. "He's still in the hospital--he had a lot of damage, so it would have been too obvious to let him come over. He wanted to, though."

"Damage?" Naruto repeated, pushing himself up higher and narrowly avoiding hitting his head on the top of the cage.

She shook her head a little. "Just a lot of broken bones . . . it was hard to get those guys to stop fighting. But, nothing was fatal or severe, so he was shunted off to the side like all the other non-criticals." She smiled. "Now that we're getting over the crises, we'll be able to work on those people. I'll put him at the top of my list."

". . . Okay," Naruto said. "Thanks, Sakura-chan."

She nodded.

". . . What are they saying?" he asked. "That happened? No one would tell me."

Sakura glanced at Sasuke, before going on to describe how Neji's statement that Naruto had led the Akatsuki out of Konoha had been taken as truth by their group and some of the older and younger people as well. (No one knew whether this was his assumption based on the events or his way of paying Naruto back, save Neji himself.) Naruto genuinely laughed when he heard about Konohamaru.

"Heh," he mumbled a few moments later, after he stopped chuckling. "All right. That's a pretty good story. Man, that brat's gonna be after the mountain next. . . ."

"It's just a story. Someone will contradict it eventually," Sasuke muttered, and gave Sakura an annoyed look when she kicked him in the heel.

"Pssh," Naruto replied, "of course they will, it's not true. But if it's better than the contradiction, it's what'll be remembered." When Sasuke gave him a skeptical look, Naruto made a little 'no, really!' gesture. "Only boring history people remember the truth--everybody else just remembers the good stories. As long as it sounds cool, it'll stick."

Sasuke paused, and then narrowed his eyes. ". . . Most of those tales you told about training with Jiraiya weren't true, were they."

Naruto pursed his lips. "They were **based** in truth. Like, sure, that one with the bordello didn't happen _exactly_ the same--but who'd want to see that pervert sannin in a kimono, anyway? We got in fine using just me!"

"Wait," this was starting to feel so close to normal that it just emphasized how surreal everything was and the too-high pitch to Sakura's giggles told Sasuke she felt the same, "Jiraiya _pimped you out_?"

"Hey!" Naruto looked offended. "Have you **seen** my sexy jutsu? It's not like he had to _try_."

Sakura couldn't hold back her laughter at the petulant tone of his voice, and wound up sinking to the floor with a hand over her mouth. Sasuke just stared at him.

"And you called my snakes bad," he finally said.

"They are," Naruto replied with aggressive cheerfulness. "I think we all just learned from perverts. I mean, Tsunade _still_ looks like a twenty-year-old! Hey, Sakura-chan, has she ever told you any stories about picking up young guys in bars before she came here? I bet she did."

Sakura's shoulders were shaking from trying to suppress her laughter, and Sasuke had pressed his lips together hard in an attempt to keep away a smile.

Sakura's last chuckle cracked slightly, but she covered it well, and Sasuke and Naruto pretended not to notice. They lapsed into silence again.

Eventually, she moved to stand up again, and Sasuke held out a hand to help. Naruto cleared his throat.

"I hope--" he started, but then hesitated when he met Sakura's eyes. "You and Lee--you'll be happy. He's a good guy. He deserves you."

She smiled faintly, and nodded. "Ye--. . . thank you. Naruto."

He looked at Sasuke.

". . . You're an asshole," Naruto said decisively, and held his hand out through the bars with a small but real smile. "I'm glad we were friends."

Sasuke was still for several heartbeats, and then took it.

"Yeah," he said. "Me too."

After several long, silent moments, Sakura pulled the syringe out of her belt. Sasuke felt the sudden tension that ran through Naruto's arm, even as he kept his face in almost the same expression, and it took so much effort not to tell him _It isn't over between us yet_.

Sakura prepped the syringe for air bubbles, and then stepped closer and turned Naruto's outstretched arm slightly so that she could reach the inside of his elbow. She pressed her thumb over the main vein in the juncture and said, "This won't--I mean, the needle will sting, but you're not a wuss, and then it should . . . should just be. . . ."

"Hey," Naruto said gently, tilting his head until he could almost catch her gaze, ". . . stop making that face. I've _told_ you, nothing could make me hate Sakura-chan."

Sakura smiled shakily, and slid the needle in.

She depressed the plunger evenly, though, and Sasuke absently noted that she was skilled enough not to let her emotions interfere with her medical work even in a situation like this. Naruto made a face when she pulled it out, and muttered a little whined "Oww."

"Wuss," Sakura said half-heartedly, tucking the syringe back into her belt plunger first.

"You guys," Naruto said, looking back and forth between them, "don't fight. Got it? If you do, I'll--_haunt _you!"

"'Haunt' us," Sasuke repeated in a voice that almost pulled off disbelieving.

"I **will**," Naruto snapped. "Don't be assholes to each other."

"Okay, okay," Sakura murmured. "I promise."

Naruto fixed Sasuke with a glare. After a moment, he closed his eyes and made an annoyed noise. "I'll try."

"Hey," Sakura retorted. "If you only have to try, I only have to try too."

"If I said 'I promise' I'd be lying."

"All the more--"

"Whoa," Naruto said quietly. "Dizzy."

They both fell silent.

Naruto soon slumped back against the cot, arm falling. Sakura stepped forward and grasped his wrist. Several moments after that, Sasuke let his hand drop to his side. He took a step closer to Sakura.

He wasn't sure if it was four minutes or three before she dropped Naruto's wrist and held a hand over his mouth. Sakura paused again, then touched two fingers behind his ear. And then she rolled her shoulders back, and moved his arm so that it wasn't hanging through the bars anymore.

". . . He _smiled_ at me," she said quietly.

"We don't have time," Sasuke replied.

Sakura shook her head, and then nodded once. "I packed my gloves," she said. "So they wouldn't get taken."

"Does that render your strength useless?"

"No," she replied. "But it cuts it down a lot."

He bent down and burned away several more of the ofuda holding the cage to the floor. Sakura helped him turn it over.

Sasuke was settling Naruto on his back when Yuugao knocked on the door. Sakura and Sasuke looked at each other, and then Sakura fingered the needle of the syringe and called, "Come in."

"Please forgive my rudeness, Yuugao-san," Sakura said when the woman entered, "but we don't want any witness of the location where we bury him, to absolutely prevent a leak."

"Of course," Yuugao replied, keeping emotion out of her voice. "Hokage-sama already radioed me of your wish. You're free to go as soon as I check him." She made a motion, and Sasuke let Naruto slide off his back and onto the cot again.

Sasuke positioned himself at Yuugao's side as she checked Naruto's pulse. Sakura stepped up to her other side, but not so close as to make Yuugao even more cautious than she already was.

"Where did you inject the poison?" Yuugao asked quietly.

"The elbow of his left arm," Sakura replied.

Yuugao was already reaching for a scroll as she said: "The Hokage's poison is supposed to leave an immediate black mark."

Sasuke went for her arm.

His position was completely open--she could easily land a blow to his side or sweep out his feet in a quick movement. Sasuke wasn't trying to fight her; his only intention was to wrench her arm hard enough that she was forced to turn towards him with the momentum, putting Sakura at her back.

Even without her gloves, one punch to the vertebrae of Yuugao's neck was all Sakura needed.

Yuugao pitched against Sasuke, sending the both of them to the floor, even as Sasuke shoved himself back to keep as little of himself trapped under her as possible. He jerked her sword out as he checked for a slowing pulse, and then tossed it to Sakura.

Sasuke yanked Naruto back over his shoulders, and then hooked his arm through the one of Sakura's that wasn't holding the sword, and teleported them to the roof he had once been on that was closest to the alley Ichiro and Konohamaru were waiting in.

—

Sakura was still breathing shallowly when they appeared there, so Sasuke took three seconds they couldn't afford and adjusted Naruto to a more carry-able position.

"I didn't want--in our own _village_ . . ." Sakura whispered.

Sasuke said, "Let's go."

The instinct that would tell them the anbu had been silently alerted and sent out hadn't activated by the time they reached the shadows in the alley. Konohamaru had already henged himself into Sakura, and an old backpack into a good version of Naruto, except that it was lacking the claws. That was what had been had planned, in order to make the few seconds they would pause in the alley appear to be the result of Sasuke and Sakura trading the weight, in case they were followed despite all protests. Ichiro was a perfect imitation of Sasuke, scars and all, except for the fact that he was a few centimeters too short--but that wouldn't be visible when he was running.

"I'm sorry," Sakura told Konohamaru, at the same time Sasuke said "Go!" to Ichiro.

Ichiro took off for the other exit of the alley, with Konohamaru a heartbeat behind. Sasuke and Sakura pressed against the wall that gave the most shadow, dropping Naruto between them.

Hinata wasn't in the alley, like she was supposed to be.

Sasuke reached back and took Yuugao's sword from Sakura. It was a proper ninja sword, shorter than his katana, and uncurved, but he could use it well enough if necessary. He pressed the blade along his leg to prevent any light from catching and reflecting.

"She's not coming," Sakura said under her breath, as she pulled out the syringe and held it as a needle.

"Thirty seconds," Sasuke replied just as quietly, scanning the area in front of him with the sharingan. "She's been late before."

Eight seconds later, the first blaze of fire went up on Sakura's side, indicating that the anbu had been deployed and that they hadn't run past Sasuke's gaze. He kept the sharingan activated.

Sakura let out a sharp breath. "That's _your_ fire ju--"

"Count," Sasuke interrupted, refusing to look behind.

Nineteen seconds after that, there had been two more fireballs and he saw someone coming towards the alley. Sasuke tightened his grip on the hilt and shifted it out slightly, and heard Sakura tense in an echo. Then the person's chakra got close enough for Sasuke to recognize Hinata's features, and then she jumped over a roof and into the alley. She had the same colors of clothes as Sakura and Lee.

She started to speak, but Sasuke cut her off with a sharp motion from his free hand. Hinata nodded once and scanned the area with her already-activated byakugan. Sasuke shoved the sword partially into his boot and pressed his hands into the seal for teleporting. Sakura dropped the needle, reached back, slung Naruto's arms over her shoulders and then did the same.

Hinata finished scanning the area and turned back toward them, deactivating the byakugan and forming the same seal.

"Front gate," Sasuke said. "Sakura, left side, Hinata, right, three meters out. That's close enough."

"Right," Hinata murmured. Sakura left, and Sasuke and Hinata quickly followed.  
-

Sakura and Hinata landed on their respective sides of the gate, and Sasuke in the center.

"The tree," Sakura called, and barely stopping to refocus chakra and breathe, the three of them teleported again.

—

Finding a location far enough from Konoha's walls that all four of them had seen was difficult, but when Sakura thought of and mentioned the tree, they all had known which she meant.

It was an extremely old maple, just under twenty kilometers from Konoha, which had been hit by lightning twice and was thus gnarled into an unforgettable shape. Lee was already waiting a meter away when they arrived. He hurried over with the packs, and then pulled Naruto off Sakura's back.

Hinata was already carrying her backpack and her weapons, so Sakura pointed her to the small bag containing Naruto's new clothes. "Help Lee dress him, quick?"

Lee traded Naruto's pants first while Hinata looked away, and then she fixed the socks and boots while he forced Naruto's arms into a shirt and a pale gray jacket. They both hooked his pack on, and then Lee tried to position Naruto across his shoulders in a way that wouldn't wrench his own backpack off but would allow him to carry the other teenager relatively comfortably until he woke. Sasuke strapped the katana to his back before reaching for his own pack.

"Are you okay?" Hinata asked, noticing Sakura's still-pale face.

"Fine," she answered, finishing with the first of her weapons pouches and reaching for her backpack. "Just . . . adrenaline."

"Ah," Hinata murmured. She hesitated, and then said: "I'm sorry, for being late."

"It's okay," Sakura replied. ". . . We almost went on without you. What happened? You were followed?"

"No, no," Hinata replied. "But I wasn't able to get out when I meant to . . . but Neji-niisan created a distraction while he on patrol duty, and that gave me an opening."

Sakura turned to face her, one hand stilled in the action of pulling Ino's scarf out of her backpack. "Wait, _Neji_ knows?" She glanced at Lee, but he looked just as surprised. Sasuke also looked over from where he'd been studying the goldfinch that had settled on a branch near him.

Hinata nodded. "Yes. . . . He guessed a while ago."

Sakura started to swear, and then saved her breath and looked back in the direction of Konoha. "Then why didn't . . . isn't. . . ."

Hinata fidgeted. "I--I know it was presumptuous of me, but . . . I did ask him, if he wanted to come. He chose to stay in Konoha."

Lee nodded, slowly, and that was enough for Sakura to accept the answer as a likely truth. She finished tightening the straps of her back pack and began attaching her second weapons pouch to her belt.

"He . . . he wanted me to tell you all thank you," Hinata added, and then looked to Lee. "And, um, that--" she reddened slightly "--that you're a sentimental idiot."

Lee nodded again.

"Yes," he said seriously. "I get it from my father."

Sasuke, as the one who had done this before, gauged that everyone would have gotten their breath back from the large amount of sporadic chakra use that teleporting demanded and looked around. "Are we ready? Sakura, keep behind Lee so you'll be able to reach Naruto first when he wakes up. Hinata, stay near to the rear and keep checking for anyone following."

"Let's go," Sakura said, tying the scarf over her hair. "We have to get as far as possible--it'll take Naruto at least half an hour to get the drug out of his system." She tugged on the ends, and then let her hands fall and eyed the trees above.

Sasuke glanced back at the goldfinch, and it twittered before flying off. Lee adjusted Naruto one last time. Hinata checked that the weapons pouch on her leg was firmly attached.

And then they left.

——

Six nights and one extremely loud, frustrated, tearful and angry conversation between team seven later, they knocked on the door of Tazuna's house. Inari was thrilled to see Naruto again.


	22. ripple epilogue: the five missingnins

Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

**Warning**: I hesitated at posting this for a long time (well, it also took me forever to write), because this _has_ been a primarily gen story, but the epilogue has a lot of references to pairings, one of which is so odd it probably couldn't be worked out except under these circumstances. So if you were here to read gen, and have no interest in pairings, you might want to stop here. All you'll miss is some politics and fighting.

"Kai" means forgiveness (at least according to the name site I used), and breaking the strap on a wooden sandal like Jiraiya's is considered bad luck.  
——————

-

For the first few years, Kakashi was not contacted for hunternin duty. Not many were sent out after the first month, when Tsunade had finished weeding out the anbu whose motivations she was suspicious of by assigning them to the task; and only one came back.

But, four months and a week after the five missingnins had abandoned Konoha, the Cloud village was contacted by the lord of the country, on behalf of the remains of an onmyouji clan that was connected to his household. The clan had been desiccated by what--if the half-hysterical stories of the surviving members could be believed--were two teenagers and a variety of impossibly-sized snakes. The Cloud shinobi had spent over two weeks trying to piece everything together, but finally were forced to give in to the lord's pushing and contact the best-known (legitimate) snake trainer in the alliance, Mitarashi Anko of the Leaf.

Anko had no sooner arrived in the small village around the Shakuhachi clan's household before sending back word that Kakashi should come to the site under whatever pretense necessary.

——

He was escorted to the front courtyard of the house by a Cloudnin, where Anko was waiting.

"They cleaned up a hell of a lot of this place before I got here," was the first thing she said, once they'd effectively dismissed the Cloudnin, "but I managed to keep this preserved," and she gestured to a brief set of tracks that had torn up the ground before shoving her hair away from the side of her face. When she let her arm drop again, the netting of her shirt caught briefly on the fang-made scars along her collarbone.

(Anko's body had been found by a border patrol group of the Sand, with the ingredients and instructions to create antidotes to the venoms in her blood attached to her. She'd been brought in, healed, and sent out again without any comment or appearance from Gaara.

A second letter had been attached to her, so heavily sealed that there was no risk of anyone having opened it before Temari delivered it to him.

Gaara never told anyone what was in that letter, but in the following months his siblings noticed that there was sometimes a near-calm in his expression that had been absent since Sakura told him Naruto was dead.)

Kakashi crouched by the area and studied it for a few minutes, and then figured out that it was two separate tracks from two separate jutsus, running side-by-side. It was hard to tell at first glance, but there was a straight, extended seam down the middle of the tracks which didn't match the wide groove on the right or the erratically zigzagged markings on the left.

"Ah," he said.

"Did you ever try using the chidori with that brat's attack?" Anko asked.

"Rasengan," Kakashi replied. "Once, with my teacher . . . but it didn't mesh as smoothly as this."

Anko snorted and looked over to the far wall, where there was clear evidence of repatching. "**Now** they start working together."

He glanced at the wall as well, noticing that there were other patches covering unfamiliarly small holes near the worst damage. "Do you have any suspicions why they did this?"

"He had to pay the snakes back," Anko said simply. "The reason there's still survivors is probably because they realized they were doing him a favor by taking this place out."

Kakashi avoided the issue of how much Anko knew about summoned snakes out of posthumous courtesy to Sarutobi, who had called her in for a discussion after Orochimaru abdicated and then allowed her to continue her rise through the ranks with no opposition. "'A favor'?" he repeated, raising an eyebrow questioningly.

"Ask one of them about the daughter of the clan head who disappeared several years ago, after being passed over as heir," Anko replied. "Then ask for a description of the man who was seen speaking to her a couple weeks beforehand."

". . . ah," Kakashi said again, and looked back at the tracks.

——

The occasional hunternin was still being sent whenever undeniable information came in, until the day Tsunade realized the Hyuuga clan had been sending their own search parties and then blaming the deaths on the scrimmages tied to Waterfall. They were no longer able to cover things up when Neji dragged himself into Konoha using a large branch from a species of tree that only grew in the small islands to the south of Water Country. Sakura had healed him enough that he could return, but not chase after them, and he had to go back under surgery once he'd returned for the damage he'd done to his knees with such a long walk.

"One of the main house members attempted to activate Hinata-sama's curse seal," he replied when asked why the gouges down his chest had been so deep.

—

Tsunade didn't speak to the elders of the clan. Instead, she had Hanabi brought to her office for a private meeting, and explained to the twelve-year-old seriously but without condescension that what the clan had been doing was the equivalent of clandestinely using and disposing of resources that were the property of the Leaf. Tsunade didn't want to imagine Konoha without the Hyuuga clan, and if Hanabi thought that there were any members of her family who felt otherwise, then it was her responsibility as the head to have the situation quickly brought to attention.

Hanabi was a girl more than intelligent enough to pick her battles.

It helped that with Neji's return, she had mostly achieved what she'd wanted.

—

After Neji was out of the surgery and had rested for a night, Tsunade and Jiraiya visited him in his room so he could make an official report.

From the way he chose his words when describing the attack, it was hard to tell whether Hinata had betrayed her clan by revealing the byakugan's blind spot or if the others had figured it out themselves--after all, Lee had been his teammate for nearly five years, and could have noticed the weakness during any of their missions together. He described efficiently and with little change in tone the way the other members in his group had been killed, until Lee and Sakura had finally pinned Naruto down long enough to return to himself. Hinata had drawn Naruto away from the fight while the other three covered them and Neji dragged himself back onto his feet.

It was then, near the end of his description, that the report grew complicated.

"Wait," Jiraiya said with a frown, "you're saying he summoned a clone that looked like Hiashi?"

"No, sir," Neji replied. "Uchiha performed a rapid succession of seals, and while I was dodging Rock and Haruno's attacks, he summoned a rectangular box larger than an average adult male. It was when the lid of it fell away that I saw Hiashi-sama," and Neji then went on to describe how Hiashi had spoken like himself up to the point that Sasuke, still protected by a wall of the remains of Naruto's clones, had driven a kunai with a tag hastily written in blood attached to it through the back of his skull. While he had still been battling Hiashi, someone--he suspected Sakura--had landed a blow with a sharp, drugged weapon to his blind spot. When he regained consciousness, he had found himself in the care of a small fishing family that denied any acquaintance with the people who had left him there.

"I see," Tsunade said finally, folding her arms. "When were you attacked with the mangekyou?"

". . . Never that I remember," he replied. "But I dreamed that I woke up while the five were in-route somewhere. If that wasn't a dream, it would have been then."

Tsunade nodded. "What happened?"

"Uchiha asked me if I had anything I wished to say to Hinata-sama," Neji replied. "I said no."

"Did you try to attack him?"

"No. I thought I was dreaming."

She nodded again, once. "Is there anything else you want to add?"

"That's everything I observed," Neji replied.

Tsunade didn't say anything further, and didn't move. After a minute and fourteen seconds, Neji said, still dispassionately, "I had thought I'd proved my loyalty to Konoha. However, if you disagree, that is an issue that should be taken up with my clan head."

"I didn't question your loyalty," Tsunade replied. "You're sitting here, after all."

—

Tenten had been waiting around the corner; two minutes after Jiraiya and Tsunade left, she came in.

"Gai-sensei's supposed to be back from his mission tomorrow afternoon," she said, opening the package of fruit on the nightstand that had been sent by Hanabi.

Neji nodded once.

"He's broken his left forearm," he said several moments later, after ascertaining that there was no one outside the room in earshot. "Badly enough that the bone still had marks after Sakura's work."

Tenten made a quiet, not entirely surprised noise, and set the package back on the table.

"They drove Kiba and Shino out while you were still in surgery," she said. "Is there anything for me to tell them, or were the bugs here?"

"They were," he replied. "But tell them that she's healthy, and pregnant. And they shouldn't talk about it."

Tenten's eyes had widened slightly with his middle sentence, but when he reached the last one, she shook her head slightly.

"If you're insulting people's intelligence, you're fine," she said with a half-smile, and left.  
-

Neji didn't mention to anyone the long conversation he had had with Sasuke about the Hyuuga's garden, coded so that Hinata would understand all the news he wanted to pass along.

He also didn't mention that he had told Sasuke Hanabi had requested an early wedding present from her sister, in the form of a drug that would survive the six-plus years and leave her barren after her first child. She didn't trust anyone in the village not to spread the news, even if they could create it in the first place.

The drug was sewn into the back of his weapons pouch, behind the rings to hold kunai. Lee had correctly guessed that Tenten would take Neji's accessories and hold them for him when he was put in the hospital, thus securing it from the clan's eyes until it was in Hanabi's possession.

—

While Neji had been describing the Impure World Resurrection jutsu, Tsunade and Jiraiya had exchanged looks.

(The looks were based on how it would be difficult to phrase the attack in the written report, however, and not on the fact that Sasuke knew one of Orochimaru's worst jutsus. They had already been aware of that, from the time that Jiraiya had hunted down Naruto.

He'd met the teenager halfway to the place they'd been tracked; the frogs had decided not to answer to either of them when they fought, and Gama Bunta had informed Jiraiya and Naruto personally, which had subsequently given Naruto an advance warning. Sasuke and Sakura had gone with him; Sasuke had summoned Orochimaru while Sakura healed her burns from the fox demon's chakra and then carried Naruto off.

Jiraiya was alive because Sasuke had given Orochimaru specific orders not to murder him, because there had been one second and one breath when Naruto had the opening to kill Jiraiya and couldn't do it. It helped that Shizune--who'd been sent by a panicked Tsunade to follow him, after the older woman learned that Jiraiya had broken the strap of his wooden sandals the night before leaving--had reached him in time to heal his wounds, none of which were fatal but all of which would have killed him before he made it to civilization.

Orochimaru had always been a master of finding loopholes; some things never disappeared no matter what the circumstances.)

For nearly three and a quarter years after that, no more shinobi were sent to hunt Konoha's five missingnins. The only contact that the village had with them afterward was a team of chuunin which ran up against Naruto and Sasuke when the two separate jobs crossed wires.

All the members of the team came back alive, if heavily wounded; it was tacitly assumed this was because Ino had been among them.

——

When Kakashi came to the assigning room like usual to receive his next mission, the only people in there were Tsunade and Shizune. That was all he needed.

"There's been a rumor that a pink-haired woman and a dark-haired young man brought in another man for medical treatment," Tsunade said, not looking at him but instead putting together the assignment for the person who would be coming in after him. This mission wouldn't be recorded unless he came back. "The second man had severe damage to his skeleton; bone fragments were littered throughout it."

Tsunade finally put the papers down and looked at him.

"One of the first things I taught her, when she was ready, was how to do the surgery for Rock if he ever used that jutsu again," she told him. "If she wasn't capable of performing it, something is wrong."

Kakashi nodded.

"The top priority is Naruto," Tsunade went on, pulling over another file and focusing her attention on it. "The Hyuuga have requested that Hinata be brought back to stand trial, given her record before; but if this creates a compromising situation, ignore it," and by that she was telling him _Give no mercy, because they'll use it to their advantage_.

Kakashi nodded again.

Tsunade gave him the coordinates of the hospital that the news had originated from, one located on the second largest island in Lightning County's waters, and dismissed him.

—

Kakashi had seriously doubted that they were living in the same place the hospital was located at, and he'd been right. It took him under a week to track them down to a different island, the one that was largest and closest to Lightning.

The intelligence he'd gathered had directed him to a small rice farming village in the higher ground, but early in the morning he found Sakura shopping in the fishing town along the route to it first. There was a young child with her, with glossy blue-black hair like Hinata's. The child looked around two; Kakashi wasn't close enough to estimate whether it would have already been conceived when Neji fought them or not.

It was easier to ascertain why Sakura had shied away from performing the chakra-heavy surgery on Lee--she was pregnant, and in either her sixth or seventh month. Her stomach muscles were still holding out, but it wouldn't be long before she began to show strongly. In addition to the basket she was carrying, there was a slightly battered pack slung over her back, with inner bulges that matched the contents of medical supplies.

_Once a doctor, always a doctor_, Kakashi thought, and remembered that the fastest way to catch the rare medicnins who turned missingnin was to poison or subterfugely injure a civilian and wait for the medic to be called to their aid.

That had been attempted on Sakura, twice, when they'd had estimates of locations; but each time she'd been intelligent enough to spot the trap and kunoichi enough to let the patients die while she fled.

Sakura tugged on the girl's sleeve, urging her away from a display of shell jewelry, and began heading down the road, away from him. She called a brief greeting into a restaurant as Kakashi pulled up his forehead protector and carefully slipped along behind her.

—

Paranoia was an inescapable part of a missingnin's life; Kakashi knew Sakura had caught his presence when she shifted the child so that it was walking in front of her, and was protected from any direct attacks.

Sakura only took a few more steps before coming to a halt. Kakashi walked up to her, stopping when two meters' distance remained between them. He checked that Sakura wasn't making a move toward her gloves.

"Hello, Kakashi-sensei," she said, and turned around. She kept a hand against the girl as she did, so that he wasn't able to get a glimpse of her face. He was more focused on Sakura's, however, especially when he realized that his eyes hadn't been failing him before: Sakura was nineteen, but she looked twenty-three. She had a faded but well-cared for scarf tied across her forehead, holding her bangs back from her face and concealing the teardrop mark of Tsunade's jutsu gone wrong.

(Sakura simply told the people in every town they passed through that she'd once had an angry patient who had scarred her badly, varying the details from time to time to keep the story from being traceable.)

"Hello, Sakura," he replied.

"You should have waited until I was out of the village," she said.

"I suppose so," he replied.

The girl was struggling to get a glimpse of him; Sakura kept pushing her back behind her legs and trying to hold her there without giving him too much of an advantage.

It was odd behavior, even for the situation; Kakashi shifted his foot slightly, Sakura tensed, and the girl managed to get underneath her hand. Kakashi felt a narrow line of tension go through his shoulders as he saw why Sakura had wanted to hide her from him: the girl's eyes were neither white nor blue like he'd expected, but black.

From the side of his vision, he saw Sakura's expression go hard and blank, and shifted to face her directly again.

". . . It was the hospital, wasn't it?" she said a moment later, after she'd pushed the girl behind her again.

"Yes," he replied.

Sakura let out an exhale that didn't move enough muscles to be a sigh. "Sasuke _said_ we should kill those doctors, but. . . ."

She didn't finish the sentence, and instead refocused on his small movements. He did the same.

"What happened that Lee had to resort to using the Extreme Lotus?" Kakashi asked, in case an extended conversation would make her drop her guard slightly.

It was apparently the wrong thing to say, however--Sakura's expression turned angry and then colder.

"It's not the Leaf's concern any more," she replied tightly.

Kakashi found her phrasing odd, but doubted she would comment further on it. So far, the best opening she'd given him was the arm she had behind her, protecting the little girl's back.

"You're putting yourself in a difficult situation," he mentioned, glancing briefly to her arm.

Sakura just looked at him.

"She's barely a child," Kakashi said. "I'm not going to kill her."

"You should," Sakura replied harshly. "Do you think you could take her back to the Leaf? After everything Sasuke and Ita--that man did? It'd be the cruelest thing."

Kakashi couldn't deny the wisdom in that.

"Hm," he said, and looked back at her arm. "There might not be as much trouble," he suggested, "if the byakugan and sharingan canceled each other out."

"They didn't. She'll gain the sharingan."

"Not all the Uchiha managed to activate the gene."

"She was born blind," Sakura said. "I rearranged the genes when I did the surgery to make the sharingan dominant. She will."

Kakashi knew enough of medicine that he didn't bother to keep the impressed tone out of his voice, even knowing what she'd been capable of before. "Ah." He glanced at Sakura's arm again, but she had managed to keep the girl almost completely hidden behind her, so he stopped wasting the effort. "I guess that's why they felt they could take the risk?"

"I," Sakura started, and then said something else. "I don't know what they were first thinking. I guess. Hinata di--."

She paused again, and then apparently decided it was safe to tell him. "Hinata-chan didn't know enough about the byakugan medically for them to feel that comfortable depending on me, but she told me it was better than dragging another woman into our life."

"Ahh," Kakashi replied, and moved his head in the faintest version of a nod.

". . . I was against it," Sakura went on, shifting the hand behind her as if checking that the girl couldn't hear. "You know Sasuke," she continued. "But Hinata-chan said that--."

Sakura hadn't been his closest student before, but every abrupt break was an unpleasant reminder of the choices between him and his team now.

"They get along better than I expected," Sakura continued. "Even if it's weird how formal they are between each other. I'm glad I'm not from a clan if _that's_ supposed to be normal. And then with Naruto--"

Another stop, but this one made him raise an eyebrow. "With Naruto?"

". . . ." Sakura's lips pursed slightly.

And then, for a brief second, she finally dropped her guard.

"**Augh**!" Sakura burst out. "They were stupid boys and they're stupid men and if _I_ were Hinata-chan, _I_ would smother them in their sleep and be _done_ with it already!"

He curled the edges of his mouth up slightly. "I'm sure they're grateful you aren't."

"Not grateful enough," Sakura muttered, having recovered her stance. Kakashi nodded twice in sympathy.

"I'll take your advice, then," he added.

It took Sakura a moment to attach the statement to what she'd said earlier; when she did, her arm trembled briefly. When she spoke again, she wasn't completely able to remove the emotion from her voice. "Why did you come?"

"You three are my responsibility," he replied.

"Kurenai-san didn't come," Sakura said, and added meaningfully: "_Gai-san_ didn't come."

"That's different," he answered.

"It isn't," Sakura retorted. "You were like a father to him."

"I don't think it was quite like that," Kakashi replied, and then closed his normal eye. "And I didn't have the permission to refuse."

Sakura didn't reply to that, maybe catching on to what he'd been attempting, maybe not feeling there was anything more to say, and instead watched him guardedly.

Killing a toddler in a foreign civilian village while he was still wearing his forehead protector would cause some trouble later on, but there was no way for Sakura to defend her back while also trying to protect the girl. Unfortunately, there also wasn't much of her back that he could hit without potentially harming the fetus.

He was still considering the best move to make when Sakura's eyes flicked, just briefly, just barely, to something past his shoulder before rapidly focusing on his own again. A second later, he heard someone throw something large at him.

Kakashi caught it without turning from her--_A pot_, he thought, sliding his fingers rapidly from their weak grip on the side to a much firmer one over the rim--and then heard the air whistle as something else, something smaller, was thrown much too quickly after the pot to be civilian reflexes.

He turned half to the side, saw the dull glint of metal in the light, and blocked the knife with the pot. The man behind him threw a second one that Kakashi caught as Sakura yanked the girl off her feet and fled, and before he could make a move after her, the man was running at him.

Kakashi grabbed his arm and knocked his feet out from under him, noting that it was too easy--the man wasn't good enough to be challenging him head on, especially not when Kakashi had the sharingan. And from the look in the man's eyes as he tried to catch himself with his free hand and feet before his back hit the ground, he was aware of the difference in their levels. He was attacking suicidally to give Sakura the chance to escape.

He had surgical scars along his forearms.

Sakura's work was very precise, Kakashi thought to himself as he slammed a knee down into the man's stomach, making him hack violently. He then twisted the arm in his grip around until he could break it at the elbow more easily, and stood up. The man curled in around his arm; Kakashi took off in the direction Sakura had fled, following her scent.

——

Sasuke's first thought as he dropped the hoe he'd been using was _Not him_ even though he'd been waiting for it for the last four years.

Naruto was already slogging across the other rice field he'd been working in, calling to him. Sasuke used chakra to shove his feet onto the surface of the water and took off for the edge, no longer caring about the villagers they were surrounded by.

Naruto followed his lead, shoving chakra into his feet and screaming over his shoulder for Hinata. It wasn't necessary--she was already coming out of the house in the distance, because even if she didn't recognize Kakashi's chakra, Sakura was using her own as an obvious warning.

For one second, Sasuke didn't know why Naruto was telling her to come--it was their teacher, their fight, and someone needed to throw their stuff together and help Lee--and then he remembered that Sakura had taken their daughter shopping with her.

Then he remembered his plan, and skidded to a stop even while slamming his hands through the seals to transport. Naruto stopped as well, scraping his hand through the dirt as extra ballast and swinging around to stare at him.

"I'll catch up, go!" Sasuke snapped, and disappeared before Naruto could demand anything.  
-

Once Sasuke was gone, Naruto didn't wait. He shoved himself back out of the crouch and tore off in Sakura's direction.  
-

Sasuke appeared thirty-three seconds later, on a tree branch slightly ahead of him. Both of his sleeves were pushed up, and an arm guard was dangling by a strap from the left one. He was holding the second guard between his teeth. Sasuke started tightening it even as Naruto reached him, and they continued running toward the point where Kakashi was catching up with Sakura.

"Clones," Sasuke managed to say half-clearly enough that Naruto understood him.

"Sent 'em already," he replied.

Sasuke finished with the first guard and yanked the other one free of his teeth, shoving it on.

"What'd you get those for?" Naruto asked as they cut right when they felt Sakura's chakra cut left.

"Hinata's still behind," was Sasuke's incongruent reply.

——

He sensed Naruto and Sasuke closing in, assumed the third chakra was Hinata's, and didn't manage to catch Sakura before they all reached each other.

Hinata was both the weakest one--blind in one eye and never the best of her generation--and the most dangerous: the one he hadn't trained, the one whose basics he didn't know. She was also the one he didn't have to worry about, because as soon as Sasuke made the opening, she'd grabbed the little girl and fled, her back protected from Kakashi by Naruto's chakra and half a dozen of his clones.

Naruto used the fox demon's chakra far, far more easily than anyone who'd fought it nineteen years ago could be comfortable with, even if things hadn't been what they were. It wasn't so much that he openly relied on it, as that it bled over into even the smallest tactics he used--afterflickers of chakra a red that was half-indistinguishable to the sharingan's followed all his movements, feet and hands. Kakashi had difficultly pushing back the instinct not to let Naruto out of his sight in order to fight Sasuke and Sakura properly.

But he _was_ their teacher, and he _did_ have more life experience over them, and he _was_ the one who'd been training in a large ninja village while for the last four years they only had the five of them and the occasional ninja they came across during jobs to practice against. It also helped that the frogs hadn't been answering to Naruto since Jiraiya nearly died, that Sakura had never even tried to summon slugs since leaving, and that Sasuke had apparently decided Kakashi was not Anko and therefore he wouldn't call the snakes against him. Kakashi had refrained from summoning his dogs as well, partly because he didn't want to see them massacred by the fox, and partly because he had been making several mistakes since seeing Sakura in the market and this was only one more.

All in all, even at three to one, the fight had been pretty even-handed right until the moment that Kakashi slammed his fist into Sasuke's chest.

Over the last two years, Sasuke had practiced taijutsu and fighting while wearing arm guards and a chest plate that he'd taken from one of the hunternin, until he'd memorized how he moved in them. Kakashi had gotten a hit to his right arm and seen a wire cut through his sleeve to the guard on the other, and assumed that the younger man was wearing the chest plate due to his movements. Sasuke had shoved his hand just up enough to save his heart.

Kakashi's reflexes were good enough that he stopped as soon as he realized it was flesh and not alumina ceramic beneath the shirt, but the ribs he'd aimed between were shattered and it felt like he'd scraped Sasuke's left lung. A breath later, Sasuke hacked violently, coughing up red-tinged saliva, which confirmed it.

Kakashi rejected the bodily reaction to swallow, and swung his free hand up even as Sasuke gripped a fist around his trapped wrist tight enough to make the bones grind together. All he needed was to get a hold on Sasuke's spine, and then there would be one less missingnin, the one less the one that knew him better than the others.

But he moved too slow, again; another mistake.

Naruto, snarling so loud that it obscured whatever Sakura was shouting, grabbed Kakashi's arm and wrenched it behind him, dislocating the shoulder in the process, even as Sasuke used the hand not around his wrist to claw at his mask until he'd yanked Kakashi's head down enough to glare into his eyes.

Sasuke's sharingan was in the mangekyou.

_Shit_, Kakashi thought, and didn't manage to look away before the colors of the world inverted themselves.

—

It was the same clearing they had been fighting in; the only differences were that Naruto and Sakura were no longer there, Sasuke was standing a meter away from him, and there was no bloody saliva on his mouth or chin.

Sasuke pulled the glasses he'd been wearing off and folded them, before hooking one of the stems over the chain of his brother's necklace.

"You won't die," he said. "In here, if I do. And Sakura won't let Naruto kill you."

"That's good," Kakashi replied.

"It was the hospital, wasn't it."

"Mm-hm," he replied. "What happened?"

"Akatsuki's still after Naruto," Sasuke replied, and Kakashi's blood stilled. "We cau--. . . ran across them during a job."

". . . Ah," he replied, and wondered whether the rephrasing was a cover for a mistake of one of the others or a lie.

"What's her name?" he asked a few moments later, after all Sasuke had done was fold his arms and glare at a point somewhere to the left of Kakashi's shoulder.

". . . Kaimi."

"_Kai_mi . . ." Kakashi mused. "Who named her, Hinata or Naruto?"

Sasuke started to say something, and then stopped. When he did answer, he was slightly redder than before. "Hinata."

Kakashi nodded, unsurprised; wordplay wasn't something Naruto had been interested in before, and Sasuke had never been one fond of forgiveness, for others or himself.

"I taught someone else the chidori," Sasuke said, abruptly, because all his confessions to Kakashi were abrupt.

"Ah," he repeated. "Who?"

"A student of mine. From Oto," Sasuke added unnecessarily. "The one who helped us escape that night."

"I see," Kakashi replied. "It won't be any use to them without the sharingan."

"I know," Sasuke replied, and that brief statement made Kakashi suspect that there was an undercurrent to things that he wasn't aware of; he thought back to the ninja in the other village, and wondered what had happened to his arms that had required surgery in the first place.

"Leave us alone," Sasuke said. "We haven't even entered Fire Country since then."

"You know it's not that simple," Kakashi replied.

"No one came after us for three years."

"After you killed over a dozen members of the village's best clan."

Sasuke almost replied to that, but then changed his mind. "They should have abandoned Hinata," he said instead, flatly. "We're not your responsibility. We made our own choices."

"As long as I have this eye, you are," Kakashi answered.

Sasuke only stared at him after that, and the mangekyou didn't permit Kakashi to read his face, if there was anything there in the first place.

"Don't follow our scent," he finally said, and added: "She won't heal you enough for you to be able to."

"I have my orders."

"You could have killed Sakura before we knew you were here," Sasuke replied, finally calling him on it, "if you'd tried. It's permissible for a hunternin to kill a missingnin in public. You could have killed me before Naruto reached you."

It was Kakashi's turn to simply watch him, showing no emotion.

The world around them was starting to disintegrate--the trees in the distance were blurring together, growing lighter in this place of opposite colors--and while Sasuke was still giving away nothing, his jaw was tense and his hands were hidden in the crooks of his elbows. Kakashi wondered if one of them were dying, and decided to hope it was Sasuke. He would never hear the end of it from Obito if _he_ died so painlessly.

The line of fading trees had encroached closer when Sasuke finally jerked his gaze and his head to the side, spitting out "**Keh**" under his breath.

"I mean it, don't follow us," Sasuke said, looking back to him. "I'll, we'll--hurt you if I have to. I'll protect them."

Kakashi tilted his head slightly.

"It's good to see you've grown," he said.

Sasuke started to answer, then cut himself off again and looked to the side.

More of the trees faded pale, until there wasn't much beyond where they were standing, and Sasuke wouldn't look at him again.

"I never could like you," he said quietly. "You always reminded me how stupid and young I was."

Kakashi gave him a small, sad smile that Sasuke couldn't see through the mask and that he kept out of his eyes, and the last of the trees went.

—

When he regained his mind, he was on the ground with his head tilted awkwardly to the side, and his arm was still painfully dislocated and very wet. Kakashi recognized it was blood as soon as he realized that he shouldn't be so dizzy from the mangekyou alone. He didn't have time to react, because his attention was focused on the chakra burning his back and the knee Naruto was digging into his spine, and on Sakura, who was kneeling by Sasuke with her hands against his chest. The area of her pants along her upper thighs was stained, which he noticed because it oddly wasn't discolored enough to be blood.

"--the trapezius!" Sakura was calling, without looking away from Sasuke. "Count six vertebrae down from the top, the left side, and don't push in too far!"

Naruto had one clawed hand digging into the nape of his neck; his mask had been ripped down enough to bare it. There was the faint tap of a needle against the bones of his spine that caused Kakashi's instincts to flare, as Naruto counted. He hesitated when he reached the sixth.

Naruto bent down slightly, knee digging further into Kakashi's spine and the muscles beside it as he did, until he was close enough to the older man's ear that he could speak and Sakura probably couldn't hear, not concentrating on Sasuke as much as she was.

"If he dies . . ." Naruto whispered, and the hand on Kakashi's neck tightened convulsively, drawing blood. "If any of them. . . . Leave us alone. Leave us _alone_. If you don't, I'll . . . tell Tsunade I'll--"

His voice cracked. It was still shaking as he said to Kakashi: "If you don't I'll go back and finish what it started. _Tell her_."

He didn't get a chance to reply; Naruto shoved the needle in immediately after, a little harder than necessary.

—

When he woke up, he was in a small house that bore the signs of being recently ransacked. A few mats were still thrown to the side.

He tracked them to a stream running through the woods on the opposite side of the village. But though Sakura had generously healed his arm and popped his shoulder back into place, his right leg felt as though she'd broken the main bone and then fused it back together off center--even the brief walk forced him to put nearly all his weight on the left. He **could** pick their scent up again, but he'd never be able to catch up.

Kakashi studied the water for a minute, then turned around and hobbled his way back to the house.

As he passed through the village again, the people were quieter than normal and went about their work self-consciously. Children were conspicuously absent.

The house turned up more than he'd expected--some clothes, the bedding he'd been placed on, cooking utensils, a few letters to people in Konoha. It looked like they'd been living in the place for several months, an impressively long period of time for five missingnin to go without being exposed. Kakashi picked up two shuriken from one of the hidden pits dug under the mats and tucked them into his pack beside the letters and his torn mask.

He made his way back to the fishing village and arrived a little before dusk. He wasn't that surprised to see that the ninja whose arm he'd broken was no longer in the street, though he was a little disappointed--the treaties forbid him from doing anything other than speaking without threats to the civilians without a shinobi from whatever village they were protected by present, and while that rule was commonly neglected, Konoha had been having more and more trouble with Waterfall of late and didn't need another problem on a different border. Questioning a missingnin raised its own issues, but only if the village he'd gone missing from found out.

He stopped at the restaurant Sakura had passed by for dinner. The service was quick, but not very cordial. He read the letters while waiting.

Naruto's was written to Iruka, the handwriting made sloppier by the speed, and a few places were solidly blacked out. Kakashi supposed none of them had ever told him the man died in Akatsuki's attack, and then decided it was for the best. The letter also indicated, most likely by accident, that the five of them were in the habit of splitting up at times and then meeting back together again, which explained why Konoha had never received as much news as it should have if all five of them had been traveling in a group for the last four years.

Hinata's letter was two in one. The first sheet of paper was to her team, saying that she was fine, with a note to Shino about a strange species of ant in Earth country and another to Kiba about an interesting mixed-breed dog she'd seen in Bird. The second was unaddressed, which was a safe way of ensuring it would reach Hanabi's hands without implicating her, and was a little poem with oddly-chosen kanji that Kakashi couldn't decipher--it could have been coded news, a congratulations that presumed Neji and Hanabi had forced their marriage through the disputes of the clan elders, or a recipe for a local stew, among several other things. Kakashi half-hoped that it was one of the more innocuous options, for Gai's and Hanabi's teacher's sake and because Neji was in the pre-selection process for the anbu and it would be a shame to lose his talent.

The letter to Gai was in Lee's words and Sakura's handwriting. It began with the statement that he and Sakura had finally properly married, having had to wait another two years since the age for civilian villages was eighteen rather than the sixteen of shinobi ones. It asked Gai to give his apologies to his mother for not inviting her to the ceremony, and also asked the man to accept his apology for not requesting he stand in for Lee's father. Kakashi put the letter away without reading farther than that.

Sakura must have thought Ino or her parents would throw away their letters without reading them, because she'd written nothing. Neither had Sasuke.

"Whose son is that man whose arm I broke?" he asked, when the owner, an older woman, came to take his dishes.

Her shoulders stiffened slightly before she answered, "No one's. He was a drifter that came in here a couple years ago."

"No he wasn't," Kakashi replied pleasantly. "His arms would have been too damaged for him to be able to hold a job unless someone had a responsibility to employ him. Sakura was only here half a year at most."

She hesitated for several seconds, and finally said quietly: "His mother--died a few years before he returned from Rice Field country. We took him back in because he was just a stupid little boy when he left. But he never talked about where he'd been to anyone, and I don't know where he went, he just . . . ran into his room and ran out again with a bag and disappeared in the middle of the street."

_That must have hurt_, Kakashi thought, and nodded once. "That was wise of him," he replied. "He would have been brought back to my village and tortured for information on those missingnins he prevented me from collecting if he'd stayed."

The woman left.

She'd still been lying about the first part--she'd glanced to the bottom left--but the rest seemed true. The fact that the man had been a Soundnin raised some questions about Sasuke and why Sakura had healed him in the first place that Kakashi didn't like.

—

After he made it back to Konoha and was resting in the hospital after having his leg rebroken and healed correctly, he handed over the letters and mentioned all his suspicions to Tsunade, except for those about how much Neji had conversed with the five missingnins years before. The poem spoke for itself, and he considered it Gai's problem, anyway.

"Why did you let them catch up to her?" Tsunade asked him, sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, arms folded under her chest.

"Sakura was visibly pregnant," he answered. "I was trying to find the best way to knock her unconscious without damaging the child."

Tsunade didn't reply for a few minutes, and then finally exhaled and glanced down at the report he'd written while still sluggish from painkillers. "You noted possible damage to her legs, but the stain wasn't blood-colored?"

He nodded.

"If she was past twenty weeks, that might have been the amniotic fluid." She glanced to Shizune, standing beside her.

The other woman hesitated before speaking. "If it's a premature birth, they won't have been able to go very far. We can hunt for hospital records or police records of an abandoned stillborn, but . . . with what Uzumaki said. . . ."

Tsunade nodded once, slowly, before looking back to Kakashi.

"Do you think he was serious?" she asked.

"Yes," he said simply.

Tsunade nodded again and said, "Shizune, look for the records personally."

"Tsunade-sama. . . ."

"We have to try," she replied, "if Akatsuki is still involved. Exterminating the fox demon's vessel before they can take it is my duty as Hokage."

Shizune nodded once, glanced at Kakashi from the side, and left.

Tsunade let her arms drop and stood up. "You should be ready to sign out in another day," she told him, before departing herself.

—

Leaving the hospital was not something he looked forward to; it meant the worst was still to come.

The letters had already been analyzed and handed over to their respective parties by the time Kakashi signed himself out. Kurenai would have the patience to bump into him when they were both in the area around the tower tomorrow evening; Gai was waiting for him in the hospital lobby.

Ino stomped up to his apartment two days later, when the news had trickled down to her level. She banged on his door for a full twelve minutes before Kakashi decided she wasn't going to assume he was in the shower like the Hyuuga representative--one of the few family members that Hanabi considered trustworthy enough to come in her stead--had the day before. Konohamaru attempted and failed to ambush him in the street, but Kakashi spoke to him anyway. Sakura's father took five days to come by his apartment for a brief and uncomfortable conversation.

It was about a week before he could walk around the village comfortably, sure that everyone who wanted news had already found him. It was a week after that that he felt he had regained enough anonymity to visit the memorial stone.

The stone had been turned partly, so that the side Konohamaru had scrawled Naruto's name on was in the back, facing the trees. The marker lines had eroded years ago, but no one had bothered to return it to its original position.

Kakashi slouched in front of the memorial and wondered how things might have gone if Naruto's name had been carved on there for real.

But wondering like that opened up too many possibilities, from what could have happened if he'd failed them all that day to what might have happened if Itachi had been accused of insubordination in the field and assassinated like several of the anbu had been murmuring about a few days before Shisui's death. And he knew that brooding over things like that was pointless--choices made couldn't be changed. Even if the actions were mended, the intentions lingered.

Sasuke, Sakura and Naruto seemed to have learned that from him, at least, though he still wished they hadn't applied it the way they had.

Kakashi stood in front of the memorial stone for a few more minutes, hands in his pockets; and then he nodded at it once and left.


End file.
